The

Unpopular Review

Vol. II, No. 3
July-September, 1914

Published Quarterly at 35 West 32d Street, New York, by

Henry Holt and Company

Contents

[pg
1]

Unsocial Investments

Return to Table of
Contents

The “new social conscience” is essentially a class
phenomenon. While it pretends to the rôle of inner monitor
and guide to conduct for all mankind, it interprets good and evil
in class terms. It manifests a special solicitude for the welfare
of one social group, and a mute hostility toward another. Labor is
its Esau, Capital its Jacob. Let strife arise between workingmen
and their employers, and you will see the new social conscience
aligning itself with the former, accepting at face value all the
claims of labor, reiterating all labor’s formulæ. The
suggestion that judgment should be suspended until the facts at
issue are established is repudiated as the prompting of a secret
sin. For, to paraphrase a recent utterance of the Survey,
one of the foremost organs of the new conscience, is it not true
that the workers are fighting for their livings, while the
employers are fighting only for their profits? It would appear,
then, that there can be no question as to the side to which justice
inclines. A living is more sacred than a profit.

It is virtually never true, however, that the workers are
fighting for their “living.” Contrary to Marx’s
exploded “iron law” they probably had that and more
before the trouble began. But of course we would not wish to
restrict them to a living, if they can produce more, and want all
who can’t produce that much to be provided with it—and
something more at the expense of others.

It may be urged that the employer’s profits also represent
the livings of a number of human beings; but this passes nowadays
for a reactionary view. “We stand for [pg 2]man as against the
dollar.” If you say that the “dollar” is metonymy
for “the man possessed of a dollar,” with rights to
defend, and reasonable expectations to be realized, you convict
yourself of reaction. “These gentry” (I quote from the
May Atlantic) “suppose themselves to be discussing
the rights of man, when all they are discussing is the rights of
stockholders.” The true view, the progressive view, is
obviously that the possessors of the dollar, the recipients of
profits and dividends, are excluded from the communion of humanity.
Labor is mankind.

The present instance is of course not the only instance in human
history of the substitution of class criteria of judgment for
social criteria. Such manifestations of class conscience are
doubtless justified in the large economy of human affairs; an
individual must often claim all in order to gain anything, and the
same may be true of a class. Besides, the ultimate arbitration of
the claims of the classes is not a matter for the rational
judgment. What is subject to rational analysis, however, are the
methods of gaining its ends proposed by the new social conscience.
Of these methods one of wide acceptance is that of fixing odium
upon certain property interests, with a view to depriving them
immediately of the respect still granted to property interests in
general, and ultimately of the protection of the laws. It is with
the rationality of what may be called the excommunication and
outlawing of special property interests, that the present paper is
concerned.

In passing, it is worth noting that the same ethical spirit that
insists upon fixing the responsibility for social ills upon
particular property interests—or property
owners—insists with equal vehemence upon absolving the
propertyless evil-doer from personal responsibility for his acts.
The Los Angeles dynamiters were but victims: the crime in which
they were implicated was institutional, not personal. Their
punishment was rank injustice; inexpedient, moreover, as
provocative of further crime, [pg 3]instead of a means
of repression. On the other hand, when it appears that the
congestion of the slum produces vice and disease, we are not urged
by the spokesmen of this ethical creed, to blame the chain of
institutional causes typified by scarcity of land, high prices of
building materials, the incapacity of a raw immigrant population to
pay for better habitations, or to appreciate the need for light and
air. Rather, we are urged to fix responsibility upon the individual
owner who receives rent from slum tenements. Perhaps we can not
imprison him for his misdeeds, but we can make him an object of
public reproach; expel him from social intercourse (if that, so
often talked about, is ever done); fasten his iniquities upon him
if ever he seeks a post of trust or honor; and ultimately we can
deprive him of his property. Let him and his anti-social interests
be forever excommunicate, outlawed.

II

In the country at large the property interests involved in the
production and sale of alcoholic beverages are already
excommunicated. The unreformed “best society” may still
tolerate the presence of persons whose fortunes are derived from
breweries or distilleries; but the great mass of the social-minded
would deny them fire and water. In how many districts would a well
organized political machine urge persons thus enriched as
candidates for Congress, the bench or even the school board? In the
prohibition territory excommunication of such property interests
has been followed by outlawry. The saloon in Maine and Kansas
exists by the same title as did Robin Hood: the inefficiency of the
law. On the road to excommunication is private property in the
wretched shacks that shelter the city’s poor. Outlawry is not
far distant. “These tenements must go.” Will they go?
Ask of the police, who pick over the wreckage upon the subsidence
of a wave of reform. Many a rookery, officially abolished, [pg 4]will
be found still tenanted, and yielding not one income, but two, one
for the owner and another for the police. The property represented
by enterprises paying low wages, working men for long hours or
under unhealthful conditions, or employing children, is almost ripe
for excommunication. Pillars of society and the church have already
been seen tottering on account of revelations of working conditions
in factories from which they receive dividends. Property
“affected by a public use,” that is, investments in the
instrumentalities of public service, is becoming a compromising
possession. We are already somewhat suspicious of the personal
integrity and political honor of those who receive their incomes
from railways or electric lighting plants; and the odor of gas
stocks is unmistakable. Even the land, once the retreat of high
birth and serene dignity, is beginning to exhale a miasma of
corruption. “Enriched by unearned increment”—who
wishes such an epitaph? A convention is to be held in a western
city in this very year, to announce to the world that the delegates
and their constituencies—all honest lovers of
mankind—will refuse in future to recognize any private title
to land or other natural resources. Holders of such property, by
continuing to be such, will place themselves beyond the pale of
human society, and will forfeit all claim to sympathy when the day
dawns for the universal confiscation of land.

III

The existence of categories of property interests resting under
a growing weight of social disapprobation, is giving rise to a
series of problems in private ethics that seem almost to demand a
rehabilitation of the art of casuistry. A very intelligent and
conscientious lady of the writer’s acquaintance became
possessed, by inheritance, of a one-fourth interest in a
Minneapolis building the ground floor of which is occupied by a
saloon. Her first endeavor was to persuade her partners to secure a
cancellation of the [pg 5]liquor dealer’s lease. This they
refused to do, on the ground that the building in question is, by
location, eminently suited to its present use, but very ill suited
to any other; and that, moreover, the lessee would immediately
reopen his business on the opposite corner. To yield to their
partner’s desire would therefore result in a reduction of
their own profits, but would advance the public welfare not one
whit. Disheartened by her partners’ obstinacy, my friend is
seeking to dispose of her interest in the building. As she is
willing to incur a heavy sacrifice in order to get rid of her
complicity in what she considers an unholy business, the transfer
will doubtless soon be made. Her soul will be lightened of the
profits from property put to an anti-social use. But the property
will still continue in such use, and profits from it will still
accrue to someone with a soul to lose or to save.

In her fascinating book, Twenty Years at Hull House,
Miss Jane Addams tells of a visit to a western state where she had
invested a sum of money in farm mortgages. “I was
horrified,” she says, “by the wretched conditions among
the farmers, which had resulted from a long period of drought, and
one forlorn picture was fairly burned into my mind…. The
farmer’s wife [was] a picture of despair, as she stood in the
door of the bare, crude house, and the two children behind her,
whom she vainly tried to keep out of sight, continually thrust
forward their faces, almost covered by masses of coarse, sunburned
hair, and their little bare feet so black, so hard, the great
cracks so filled with dust, that they looked like flattened hoofs.
The children could not be compared to anything so joyous as satyrs,
although they appeared but half-human. It seemed to me quite
impossible to receive interest from mortgages upon farms which
might at any season be reduced to such conditions, and with great
inconvenience to my agent and doubtless with hardship to the
farmers, as speedily as possible I withdrew all my
investment.” And thereby made the supply of money for such
farmers [pg
6]that much less and consequently that much dearer. This is
quite a fair example of much current philanthropy.

We may safely assume that, however much this action may have
lightened Miss Addams’s conscience, it did not lighten the
burden of debt upon the farmer, or make the periodic interest
payments less painful, and it certainly did put them to the trouble
and contingent expenses of a new mortgage. The moral burden was
shifted, to the ease of the philanthropist, and this seems to
exhaust the sum of the good results of one well intentioned deed.
Do they outweigh the bad ones?

So, doubtless, there are among our friends persons who, upon
proof that factories in which they have been interested pay
starvation wages, have withdrawn their investments. And others who,
stumbling upon a state legislature among the productive assets of a
railway corporation, have sold their bonds and invested the
proceeds elsewhere. It is a modern way of obeying the injunction,
“Sell all thou hast and follow me.” And not a very
painful way, since the irreproachable investments pay almost, if
not quite, as well as those that are suspect.

It is not, however, impossible to conceive of a property owner
driven from one position to another, in order to satisfy this new
requirement of the social conscience, without ever finding peace.
Miss Addams put the money withdrawn from those hideous farm
mortgages into a flock of “innocent looking sheep.”
Alas, they were not so innocent as they seemed. “The sight of
two hundred sheep with four rotting hoofs each was not reassuring
to one whose conscience craved economic peace. A fortunate series
of sales of mutton, wool and farm enabled the partners to end the
enterprise without loss.” Sales of mutton? Let us hope those
eight hundred infected hoofs are well printed on the
butcher’s conscience.

And the net result of all these moral strivings? The evil
investments still continue to be evil, and still yield [pg
7]profits. Doubtless they rest, in the end, upon less
sensitive consciences. Marvellous moral gain!

IV

We are bound to the wheel, say the sociological fatalists. All
our efforts are of no avail; the Wheel revolves as it was destined.
Not so. Our strivings for purity in investments, puny as may be
their results in the individual instance, may compose a sum that is
imposing in its effectiveness. How their influence may be exerted
will best appear from an analogy.

It is a settled conviction among Americans of Puritan
antecedents, and among all other Americans, native born or alien,
that have come under Puritan influence, that the dispensing of
alcoholic beverages is a degrading function. This conviction has
not, to be sure, notably impaired the performance of the function.
But it has none the less produced a striking effect. It has set
apart for the function in question those elements in the population
that place the lowest valuation upon the esteem of the public, and
that are, on the whole, least worthy of it. In consequence the
American saloon is, by common consent, the very worst institution
of its kind in the world. Such is the immediate result of good
intentions working by the method of excommunication of a trade.

This degradation of the personnel and the institution proceeds
at an accelerated rate as public opinion grows more bitter. In the
end the evil becomes so serious, so intimately associated with all
other evils, social and political, that you hear men over their
very cups rise to proclaim, with husky voices, “The saloon
must go!” At this point the community is ripe for
prohibition: accordingly, it would seem that the initial stages in
the process, unpleasant as were their consequences, were not
ill-advised, after all. But prohibition does not come without a
political struggle, in which the enemy, selected for brazenness and
schooled in corruption, employs methods that leave [pg 8]lasting scars
upon the body politic. And even when vanquished, the enemy retreats
into the morasses of “unenforcible laws,” to conduct a
guerilla warfare that knows no rules. Let us grant that the
ultimate gain is worth all it costs: are we sure that we have taken
the best possible means to achieve our ends?

In the poorer quarters of most great American cities, there is
much property that it is difficult for a man to hold without losing
the respect of the enlightened. Old battered tenements, dingy and
ill lighted tumbledown shacks, the despair of the city reformer.
Let us say that the proximity of gas tanks or noisy railways or
smoky factories consign such quarters to the habitation of the very
poor. Quite possibly, then, the replacement of the existing
buildings by better ones would represent a heavy financial loss.
The increasing social disapprobation of property vested in such
wretched forms leads to the gradual substitution of owners who hold
the social approval in contempt, for those who manifest a certain
degree of sensitiveness. The tenants certainly gain nothing from
the change. What is more likely to happen, is a screwing up of
rents, an increasing promptness of evictions. Public opinion will
in the end be roused against the landlords; the more timid among
them will sell their holdings to others not less ruthless, but
bolder and more astute. Attempts at public regulation will be
fought with infinitely greater resourcefulness than could possibly
have been displayed by respectable owners. Perhaps the final
outcome will be that more drastic regulations are adopted than
would have been the case had the shifting in ownership not taken
place. There would still remain the possibility of the evasion of
the law, and it is not at all improbable that the progress in the
technique of evasion would outstrip the progress in regulation,
thus leaving the tenant with a balance of disadvantage from the
process as a whole.

The most illuminating instance of a business interest subjected
first to excommunication—literally—and [pg 9]then to
outlawry, is that of the usurer, or, in modern parlance, the loan
shark. To the mediæval mind there was something distinctly
immoral in an income from property devoted to the furnishing of
personal loans. We need not stop to defend the mediæval
position or to attack it; all that concerns us here is that an
opportunity for profit—that is, a potential property
interest—was outlawed. In consequence it became impossible
for reputable citizens to engage in the business. Usury therefore
came to be monopolized by aliens, exempt from the current ethical
formulation, who were “protected,” for a consideration,
by the prince, just as dubious modern property interests may be
protected by the political boss.

Let us summarize the results of eight hundred years of
experience in this method of dealing with the usurer’s trade.
The business shifted from the control of citizens to that of
aliens; from the hands of those who were aliens merely in a narrow,
national sense, to the hands of those who are alien to our common
humanity. Such lawless, tricky, extortionate loan sharks as now
infest our cities were probably not to be found at all in
mediæval or early modern times. They are a product of a
secular process of selection. Their ability to evade the laws
directed against them is consummate. It is true that from time to
time we do succeed in catching one and fining him, or even
imprisoning him. For which risk the small borrower is forced to
pay, at a usurer’s rate.

Social improvement through the excommunication of property
interests is inevitably a disorderly process. Wherever it is in
operation we are sure to find the successive stages indicated in
the foregoing examples. First, a gradual substitution of the
conscienceless property holder for the one responsive to public
sentiment. Next, under the threat of hostile popular action, the
timid and resourceless property owner gives way to the resourceful
and the bold. The third stage in the process is a vigorous
political movement towards drastic regulation or abolition, [pg
10]evoking a desperate attempt on the part of the interests
threatened to protect themselves by political means—that is,
by gross corruption; or, if the menaced interest is a vast one,
dominating a defensible territory, by armed rebellion, as in our
own Civil War. If the interest is finally overwhelmed politically,
and placed completely under the ban of the law, it has been given
ample time to develop an unscrupulousness of personnel and an art
of corruption that long enable it to exist illegally, a lasting
reproach to the constituted authorities.

V

Suppression of anti-social interests by the methods in vogue
amounts to little more than their banishment to the underworld. And
we can well imagine the joy with which the denizens of the
underworld receive such new accessions to their numbers and power.
For in the nature of the case, it is inevitable that all varieties
of outcasts and outlaws should join forces. The religious
schismatic makes common cause with the pariah; the political
offender with the thief and robber. Such association of elements
vastly increases the difficulty of repressing crime. The band of
thieves and robbers in the cave of Adullam doubtless found their
powers of preying vastly increased through the acquisition of such
a leader as David. The problem of mediæval vagabondage was
rendered well-nigh incapable of solution by the fact that any
beggar’s rags might conceal a holy but excommunicated
friar.

Let us once more review our experience with the usurer. As an
outcast he offers his support to other outcasts, and is in turn
supported by them. The pawnbroker and the pickpocket are closely
allied: without the pawnshop, pocketpicking would offer but a
precarious living; without the picking of pockets, many pawnshops
would find it impossible to meet expenses. The salary loan shark
often works hand in glove with the professional gambler; each
procures victims for the other. The “hole-in-the-[pg
11]wall” or “blind tiger” provides a
rendezvous for all the outcasts of society.
“Boot-legging” is a common subsidiary occupation for
the pander, the thief and the cracksman. Where it flourishes, it
serves to bridge over many a period of slack trade. Franchises
whose validity is subject to political attack, bring to the aid of
the underworld some of the most powerful interests in the
community. The police are almost helpless when confronted by a
coalition of persons of wealth and respectability with professional
politicians commanding a motley array of yeggs and thugs, pimps and
card-sharpers.

Let us suppose that the developing social conscience places
under the ban receipt of private income from land and other natural
resources, and that a powerful movement aiming at the confiscation
of such resources is under way. It is superfluous to point out that
the vast interests threatened would offer a desperate resistance.
The warfare against an incomparably lesser interest, the liquor
trade, has taxed all the resources of the modern democratic
state—on the whole the most absolute political organization
known. In no instance has the state come out of the struggle
completely victorious; the proscribed interest is yielding ground,
if at all, only very slowly. What, then, would be the outcome of a
struggle against the vastly greater landed interest? Perhaps the
state would be victorious in the end. But for generations the
landed interest would survive, if not by title of common law, at
least by title of common corruption. And in the course of the
conflict, we can not doubt that political disorder would flourish
as never before, and that under its shelter private vice and crime
would develop almost unchecked.

We should disabuse ourselves of the notion that the will of a
mere majority is absolute in the state. The law is a reality only
when the outlawed interests represent an insignificant minority.
Arbitrarily to increase the outlawed interests is to undermine the
very foundations of society.

[pg
12]

VI

The trend of the foregoing discussion, it will be said, is
reactionary in the extreme. There are, as all must admit, private
interests that are prejudicial to the public interest. Are they to
be left in possession of the privilege of trading upon the public
disaster—entrenching themselves, rendering still more
difficult the future task of the reformer? By no means. The writer
opposes no criticism to the extinction of anti-social private
interests; on the contrary, he would have the state proceed against
them with far greater vigor than it has hitherto displayed. It is
important, however, to be sure first that a private interest is
anti-social. Then the question is merely one of method. It is the
author’s contention that the method of excommunication and
outlawry is the very worst conceivable.

We are wont to hold up to scorn the British method of
compensating liquor sellers for licenses revoked. It is an
expensive method. But let us weigh its corresponding advantages.
The licensee does not find himself in a position in which he must
choose between personal destitution and the public interest. He
dares not employ methods of resistance that would subject him to
the risk of forfeiting the right to compensation. He may resist by
fair means, but if he is intelligent, he will keep his skirts clear
of foul. If his establishment is closed, he is not left, a ruined
and desperate man, to project methods for carrying on his trade
illicitly. On the contrary, the act of compensation has placed in
his hands funds in which he might be mulcted if convicted of
violation of the law. And if natural perversity should drive him to
illegal practices, he would not find himself an object of sympathy
on the part of that considerable minority that resent injustice
even to those whom they regard as evil-doers.

There can be little doubt that by the adoption of the principle
of adequate compensation, an American commonwealth [pg 13]could
extinguish any property interest that majority opinion pronounces
anti-social. We may have industries that menace the public health.
Under existing conditions the interests involved exert themselves
to the utmost to suppress information relative to the dangers of
such industries. With the principle of compensation in operation,
these very interests would be the foremost in exposing the evils in
question. It is no hardship to sell your interest to the public.
Does any one feel aggrieved when the public decides to appropriate
his land to a public use? On the contrary, every possessor of a
site at all suited for a public building or playground does
everything in his power to display its advantages in the most
favorable light.

And with this we have admitted a disadvantage of the
compensation principle—over-compensation. We do pay
excessively for property rights extinguished in the public
interest. But this is largely because the principle is employed
with such relative infrequency that we have not as yet developed a
technique of compensation. German cities have learned how to
acquire property for public use without either plundering the
private owner or excessively enriching him. The British application
of the Small Holdings Acts has duly protected the interests of the
large landholder, without making of him a vociferous champion of
the Acts.

Progressive public morality readers one private interest after
another indefensible. Let the public extinguish such interests, by
all means. But let the public be moral at its own expense.

A revolting doctrine, it will be said. Because men have been
permitted, through gross defect in the laws, to build up interests
in dealing out poisons to the public, are they to be compensated,
like the purveyors of wholesome products, when the public decrees
that their destructive activities shall cease? Because a corrupt
legislature once gave away valuable franchises, are we and our
children, [pg 14]and our children’s children, forever
to pay tribute, in the shape of interest on compensation funds, to
the heirs of the shameless grantees? Because the land of a country
was parcelled out, in a lawless age, among the unworthy retainers
of a predatory prince, must we forever pay rent on every loaf we
eat—as we should do, in fact, even if we transformed great
landed estates into privately held funds? Did we not abolish human
slavery, without compensation, and is there any one to question the
justice of the act?

We did indeed extinguish slavery without compensation to the
slave owners. But if no one had ever conceived of such a policy we
should have been a richer nation and a happier one. We paid for the
slaves, in blood and treasure, many times the sum that would have
made every slave owner eager to part with his slaves. Such
enrichment of the slave owner would have been an act of social
injustice, it may be said. The saying would be open to grave doubt,
but the doctrine here advanced runs, not in terms of justice, but
in terms of social expediency.

And expediency is commonly regarded as a cheap substitute for
justice. It is wrongly so regarded. Social justice, as usually
conceived, looks to the past for its validity. Its preoccupation is
the correction of ancient wrongs. Social expediency looks to the
future: its chief concern is the prevention of future wrongs. As a
guide to political action, the superiority of the claims of social
expediency is indisputable.

VII

In the foregoing argument it has been deliberately assumed that
the interests to be extinguished are, for the most part,
universally recognized as anti-social. Slavery, health-destroying
adulteration, the maintenance of tenements that menace life and
morals, these at least represent interests so abominable that all
must agree upon the wisdom of extinguishing them. The only point in
dispute [pg
15]must be one of method. It is the contention of the
present writer that when even such interests have had time to
become clothed with an appearance of regularity, the method of
extinction should be through compensation. By its tolerance of such
interests, the public has made itself an accomplice in the mischief
to which they give rise, and accordingly has not even an equitable
right to throw the whole responsibility upon the private persons
concerned.

Interests thus universally recognized to be evil are necessarily
few. In the vast majority of cases the establishment of interests
we now seek to proscribe took place in an epoch in which no evil
was imputed to them. At first a small minority, usually regarded as
fanatics, attack the interests in question. This minority
increases, and in the end transforms itself into a majority. But
long after majority opinion has become adverse, there remains a
vigorous minority opinion defending the menaced interests. A
hundred years ago the distilling of spirituous liquors was almost
universally regarded as an entirely legitimate industry. The
enemies of the industry were few and of no political consequence.
Today in many communities the industry is utterly condemned by
majority opinion. There is, however, no community in which a
minority honestly defending the industry is absolutely wanting.
Admitting that the majority opinion is right, it remains none the
less true that adherents of the minority opinion would regard
themselves as most grievously wronged if the majority proceeded to
a destruction of their interests.

Where moral issues alone are involved, we may perhaps accept the
view that the well considered opinion of the majority is as near as
may be to infallibility. But it is very rarely the case that the
question of the legitimacy of a property interest can be reduced to
a purely moral issue. Usually there are also at stake, technical
and broad economic issues in which majority judgment is notoriously
[pg
16]fallible. Thus we have at times had large minorities who
believed that the bank as an institution is wholly evil, and ought
to be abolished. This was the majority opinion in one period of the
history of Texas, and in accordance with it, established banking
interests were destroyed by law. It is only within the last fifteen
years that the majority of the citizens of that commonwealth have
admitted the error of the earlier view.

In the course of the last twenty-five years, notable progress
has been made in the art of preserving perishable foods through
refrigeration. There are differences of opinion as to the effect
upon the public health of food so preserved; and further
differences as to the effect of the cold storage system upon the
cost of living. On neither the physiological nor the economic
questions involved is majority opinion worthy of special
consideration. None the less, legislative measures directed against
the storage interests have been seriously considered in a large
number of states, and were it not for the difficulties inherent in
the regulation of interstate commerce, we should doubtless see the
practice of cold storage prohibited in some jurisdictions. Those
whose property would thus be destroyed would accept their losses
with much bitterness, in view of the fact that the weight of expert
opinion holds their industry to be in the public interest.

What still further exacerbates the feeling of injury on the part
of those whose interests are proscribed, is the fact that the
purity of motives of the persons most active in the campaign of
proscription is not always clear. Not many years ago we had a
thriving manufacture of artificial butter. The persons engaged in
the industry claimed that their product was as wholesome as that
produced according to the time-honored process, and that its
cheapness promised an important advance in the adequate
provisioning of the people. We destroyed the industry, very largely
because of our strong bent toward conservatism in all matters
pertaining to the table. But among the influences [pg 17]that were
most active in taxing artificial butter out of existence, was the
competing dairymen’s interest.

It is asserted by those who would shift the whole burden of
taxation onto land that they are animated by the most unselfish
motives, whereas their opponents are defending their selfish
interests alone. Yet a common Single Tax appeal to the large
manufacturer and the small house-owner takes the form of a
computation demonstrating that those classes would gain more
through the reduction in the burden on improvements than they would
lose through increase in burden on the land. Let it be granted that
personal advantage is not incompatible with purity of motives. The
association of ideas does not, however, inspire confidence,
especially in the breasts of those whose interests are
threatened.

Extinction of property interests without compensation
necessarily makes our legislative bodies the battleground of
conflicting interests. Honest motives are combined with crooked
ones in the attack upon an interest; crooked and honest motives
combine in its defense. Out of the disorder issues a legislative
determination that may be in the public interest or may be
prejudicial to it. And most likely the law is inadequately
supported by machinery of enforcement: it is effective in
controlling the scrupulous; to the unscrupulous it is mere paper.
In many instances its net effect is only to increase the risks
connected with the conduct of a business.

When England prohibited importation of manufactures from France,
the import trade continued none the less, under the form of
smuggling. The risk of seizure was merely added to the risk of fire
and flood. Just as one could insure against the latter risks, so
the practice arose of insuring against seizure. At one time, at any
rate, in the French ports were to be found brokers who would insure
the evasion of a cargo of goods for a premium of fifteen per cent.
At the safe distance of a century and a half, the absurd
prohibition and its incompetent administration [pg 18]are equally
comic. At the time, however, there was nothing comic in the
contempt for law and order thus engendered, in the feeling of
outrage on the part of those ruined by seizures, and in the
alliance of respectable merchants with the thieves and footpads
enlisted for the smuggling trade.

VIII

It is a common observation of present day social reformers that
an excessive regard is displayed by our governmental organs for
security of property, while security of non-property rights is
neglected. And this would indeed be a serious indictment of the
existing order if there were in fact a natural antithesis between
the security of property and security of the person. There is,
however, no such antithesis. In the course of history the
establishment of security of property has, as a rule, preceded the
establishment of personal security, and has provided the conditions
in which personal security becomes possible. Adequate policing is
essential to any form of security. Property can pay for policing;
the person can not. This is a crude and materialistic
interpretation of the facts, but it is essentially sound.

How much personal security existed in England, five centuries
and a half ago, when it was possible for Richard to carve his way
through human flesh to the throne? The lowly, certainly, enjoyed no
greater security than the high born. How much personal security
exists in the late Macedonian provinces of the Turkish Empire, or
in northern Mexico? It is safe to issue a challenge to all the
world to produce an instance, contemporary or historical, of a
country in which property is insecure and in which human life and
human happiness are not still more insecure. On the other hand, it
is difficult to produce an instance of a state in which security of
property has long been established, in which there is not a
progressive sensitiveness about the non-propertied rights of man.
It is in the countries [pg 19]where the
sacredness of private property is a fetich, that one finds
recognition of a universal right to education, of a right to
protection against violence and against epidemic disease, of a
right to relief in destitution. These are perhaps meagre rights;
but they represent an expanding category. The right to support in
time of illness and in old age is making rapid progress. The
development of such rights is not only not incompatible with
security of property, but it is, in large measure, a corollary of
property security. Personal rights shape themselves upon the
analogy of property rights; they utilize the same channels of
thought and habit. One of the most powerful arguments for
“social insurance” is its very name. Insurance is
recognized as an essential to the security of property; it is
therefore easy to make out a case for the application of the
principle to non-propertied claims.

Some may claim that the security of property has now fulfilled
its mission; that we can safely allow the principle to decay in
order to concentrate our attention upon the task of establishing
non-propertied rights. But let us remember that we are not removed
from barbarism by the length of a universe. The crust of orderly
civilization is deep under our feet: but not six hundred years
deep. The primitive fires still smoke on our Mexican borders and in
the Balkans. And blow holes open from time to time through our own
seemingly solid crust—in Colorado, in West Virginia, in the
Copper Country. It is evidently premature to affirm that the
security of property has fulfilled its mission.

IX

The question at issue, is not, however, the rights of property
against the rights of man—or more honestly—the rights
of labor. The claims of labor upon the social income may advance at
the expense of the claims of property. In the institutional
struggle between the propertied and the propertyless, the
sympathies of the writer [pg 20]are with the
latter party. It is his hope and belief that an ever increasing
share of the social income will assume the form of rewards for
personal effort.

But this is an altogether different matter from the crushing of
one private property interest after another, in the name of the
social welfare or the social morality. Such detailed attacks upon
property interests are, in the end, to the injury of both social
classes. Frequently they amount to little more than a large loss to
one property interest, and a small gain to another. They increase
the element of insecurity in all forms of property; for who shall
say which form is immune from attack? Now it is the slum tenement,
obvious corollary of our social inequalities; next it may be the
marble mansion or gilded hotel, equally obvious corollaries of the
same institutional situation. Now it is the storage of meat that is
under attack; it may next be the storage of flour. The fact is, our
mass of income yielding possessions is essentially an organic
whole. The irreproachable incomes are not exactly what they would
be if those subject to reproach did not exist. If some property
incomes are dirty, all property incomes become turbid.

The cleansing of property incomes, therefore, is a first
obligation of the institution of property as a whole. The
compensation principle throws the cost of the cleansing upon the
whole mass, since, in the last analysis, any considerable burden of
taxation will distribute itself over the mass. The principle is
therefore consonant with justice. What is not less important, the
principle, systematically developed, would go far toward freeing
the legislature from the graceless function of arbitrating between
selfish interests, and the administration from the necessity of
putting down powerful interests outlawed by legislative act. It
would give us a State working smoothly, and therefore an efficient
instrument for social ends. Most important of all, it would promote
that security of economic interests which is essential to social
progress.

[pg
21]

A Stubborn Relic of
Feudalism

Return to Table of
Contents

There is a persistent question regarding the distribution of
property which is of peculiar interest in the season of automobile
tours and summer hotels. Most thinking people acknowledge a good
deal of perplexity over this question, while on most parallel ones
they are generally cock-sure—on whichever is the side of
their personal interests. But in this question the bias of personal
interest is not very large, and therefore it may be considered with
more chance of agreement than can the larger questions of the same
class which parade under various disguises.

The little question is that of tipping. After we have squeezed
out of it such antitoxic serum as we can, we will briefly indicate
the application of it to larger questions.

Tipping is plainly a survival of the feudal relation, long
before the humbler men had risen from the condition of status to
that of contract, when fixed pay in the ordinary sense was unknown,
and where the relation between servant and master was one of
ostensible voluntary service and voluntary support, was for life,
and in its best aspect was a relation of mutual dependence and
kindness. Then the spasmodic payment was, as tips are now,
essential to the upper man’s dignity, and very especially to
the dignity of his visitor. This feudal relation survives in
England today to such an extent that poor men refrain from visiting
their rich relations because of the tips. In the great
country-houses the tips are expected to be in gold, at least so I
was told some years ago. And in England and out of it, Don
Cesar’s bestowal of his last shilling on the man who had
served him, still thrills the audience, at least the tipped portion
of it.

Europe being on the whole less removed from feudal institutions
than we are, tipping is not only more firmly [pg 22]established there,
but more systematized. It is more nearly the rule that
servants’ places in hotels are paid for, and they are apt to
be dependent entirely upon tips. The greater wealth of America, on
the other hand, and the extravagance of the nouveaux
riches, has led in some institutions to more extravagant
tipping than is dreamed of in Europe, and consequently has
scattered through the community a number of servants from Europe
who, when here, receive with gratitude from a foreigner, a tip
which they would scorn from an American.

In the midst of general relations of contract—of agreed
pay for agreed service, tipping is an anomaly and a constant
puzzle.

It would seem strange, if it were not true of the greater
questions of the same kind, that in the chronic discussion of this
one, so little attention, if any, has been paid to what may be the
fundamental line of division between the two sides—namely,
the distinction between ideal ethics and practical ethics.

An illustration or two will help explain that distinction:

First illustration: “Thou shalt not kill” which is
ideal ethics in an ideal world of peace. Practical ethics in the
real world are illustrated in Washington and Lee, who for having
killed their thousands, are placed beside the saints!

Second illustration: Obey the laws and tell the truth. This is
ideal ethics, which our very legislatures do much to prevent being
practical. For instance; they ignore the fact that in the present
state of morality, taxes on personal property can be collected from
virtually nobody but widows and orphans who have no one to evade
the taxes for them. So the legislatures continue the attempt to tax
personal property, and a judge on the bench says that a man who
lies about his personal taxes shall not on that account be held an
unreliable witness in other matters.

Or to take an illustration less radical: it is not in legal
testimony alone that ideal ethics require everybody to tell the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—[pg
23]that the world should have as much truth as possible; and
if the world were perfectly kind, perfectly honest and perfectly
wise (which last involves the first two), that ideal could be
realized. For instance, in our imperfect world a man telling people
when he did not like them, would be constantly giving needless pain
and making needless enemies, whereas in an ideal world—made
up of perfect people, there would be nobody to dislike, or, pardon
the Hibernicism, if there were, the whole truth could be told
without causing pain or enmity. Or again, in a world where there
are dishonest people, a man telling everything about his schemes,
would have them run away with by others, though in an ideal world,
where there were no dishonest people, he could speak freely. In
fact, the necessity of reticence in this connection does not even
depend on the existence of dishonesty: for in a world where people
have to look out for themselves, instead of everybody looking out
for everybody else, a man exposing his plans might hurry the
execution of competing plans on the part of perfectly honest
people.

Farther illustration may be sufficiently furnished by the topic
in hand.

In the case of most poor folks other than servants, what to do
about it has lately been pretty distinctly settled: the religion of
pauperization is pretty generally set aside: almsgiving, the
authorities on ethics now generally hold, should be restricted to
deserving cases—to people incapacitated by constitution or
circumstance from taking proper care of themselves.

Now is tipping almsgiving, and are servants among the deserving
classes?

How many people have asked themselves these simple questions,
and how many who are educated up to habitually refusing alms unless
the last of the questions is affirmatively answered, just as
habitually tip servants?

Is tipping almsgiving? Not in the same sense that alms are given
without any show of anything in return: the [pg 24]servant does
something for the tipper. Yes, but he is paid for it by his
employer. True, but only sometimes: at other times he is only
partly paid, depending for the rest on tips; and sometimes the tips
are so valuable that the servant pays his alleged employer for the
opportunity to get them. Yet I know one hotel in Germany, and
probably there are others, there and elsewhere, where the menus and
other stationery bear requests against tipping. But in that one
hotel I know tipping to be as rife as in hotels generally: the
customers are not educated up to the landlord’s standard. And
here we come to the fundamental remedy for all questionable
practices—the education of the people beyond them. But this
is simply the ideal condition in which ideal ethics could prevail.
Meanwhile we must determine the practical ethics of the actual
world.

The servant’s position is different from that of most
other wage-earners, in that he is in direct contact with the person
who is to benefit from his work. The man who butchers your meat or
grinds your flour, you probably never see; but the man who brushes
your clothes or waits on your table, holds to you a personal
relation, and he can do his work so as merely to meet a necessity,
or so as to rise beyond mere necessity into comfort or luxury.
Outside of home servants, the necessity is all that, in the present
state of human nature, his regular stipend is apt to provide; the
comfort or the luxury, the feeling of personal interest, the
atmosphere of promptness and cheerfulness and ease, is apt to
respond only to the tip. Only in the ideal world will it be
spontaneous. In the real world it must be paid for.

And why should it not be—why is it not as legitimate to
pay for having your wine well cooled or carefully tempered and
decanted, as to pay for the wine itself? The objection apt to be
first urged is that it degrades the servant. But does it? He is not
an ideal man in an ideal world, already doing his best or paid to
do his best. You are not degrading him from any such standard as
that, [pg
25]into the lower one of requiring tips: you are simply
taking him as he is. True, if he got no tips, he would not depend
upon them; but without them he would not do all you want him to;
before he will do that, he must be developed into a different
man—he must become a creature of an ideal world. You may in
the course of ages develop him into that, and as you do, he will
work better and better, and tips may grow smaller and smaller,
until he does his best spontaneously, and tips have dwindled to
nothing. But to withdraw them now would simply make him sulky, and
lead to his doing worse than now.

Another objection urged against tips is that they put the rich
tipper at an advantage over the poor one. But the rich man is at an
advantage in nearly everything else, why not here? The idea of
depriving him of his advantages, is rank communism, which destroys
the stimulus to energy and ingenuity that, in the present state of
human nature, is needed to keep the world moving. In an ideal state
of human nature, the man with ability to create wealth may find
stimulus enough, as some do to a considerable extent now, in the
delight of distributing wealth for the general good; but we are
considering what is practicable in the present state of human
nature.

Another aspect of the case, or at least a wider aspect, is the
more sentimental one where the tip is prompted as reciprocation for
spontaneous kindness.

But in the service of private families, as distinct from service
to the general public or to visitors it is notorious that constant
tipping is ruinous. Occasional holidays and treats and presents at
Christmas and on special occasions are useful, as promoting the
general feeling of reciprocation. But from visitors the tip is
generally essential to ensuring the due meed of respect. Yet we can
reasonably imagine a time when it may not be; and even now, for the
casual service of holding a horse or brushing off the dust, a
hearty “thank you” is perhaps on the whole better than
a tip.

[pg
26]Considering the morality of the question all
around—the practical ethics as well as the ideal, the
underlying facts are that no man ought to be a servant in the
servile sense, and indeed no man ought to be poor; and in an ideal
world no man would be one or the other. Just how we are to get a
world without servants or servile people, is perhaps a little more
plain than how we are to get Mr. Bellamy’s world without poor
people, which, however, amounts to nearly the same thing. At least
we will get a less servile world, as machinery and organization
make service less and less personal. Bread has long been to a great
extent made away from home; much of the washing is also done away
in great laundries, and organizations have lately been started to
call for men’s outer clothes, and keep them cleaned, repaired
and pressed. There is a noticeable rise, too, in the dignity of
personal service: witness the college students at the summer
hotels, and the self-respecting Jap in the private family. These
influences are making for the ideal world in relation to service,
and when we get it, no man will take tips, and nobody will
offer them.

But in our stage of evolution, the tip, like the larger prizes,
is part of the general stimulus to the best exertion and the best
feeling, and is therefore legitimate; but it, like every other
stimulus, should not be applied in excess, and the tendency should
be to abolish it. The rich man often is led by good taste and good
morals to restrain his expenditure in many directions, and there
are few directions, if any, in which good taste and good morals
more commend the happy medium than in tips. Excess in them,
however, is not always prompted by good nature and generosity and
reciprocation of spontaneous kindness, but often by desire for
comfort, and even by ostentation. But all such promptings require
regulation for the same reason that, it is now becoming generally
recognized, the promptings of even charity itself require
regulation.

The head of one of the leading Fifth Avenue restaurants [pg
27]once said to the writer, substantially: “We
don’t like tips: they demoralize our men. But what can we do
about it? We can’t stop it, or even keep it within bounds.
Our customers will give them, and people who have too much money or
too little sense, give not only dollar bills or five dollar bills,
but fifty dollar bills and even hundred dollar bills. We have tried
to stave off customers who do such things: we believe that in the
long run it would pay us to; but we can’t.”

When all the promptings of liberality or selfishness or
ostentation are well regulated, we will be in the ideal world.
Until then, in the actual world, it is the part of wisdom to
regulate ideal ethics by practical ethics—and tip, but tip
temperately.

And now to apply our principles to a wider field.

The ideal is that all men should have what they produce. The
ideal is also that all men should have full shares of the good
things of life. These two ideals inevitably combine into a
third—that all men should produce full shares of the good
things of life. But the plain fact is that they cannot—that
no amount of opportunity or appliances will enable the average day
laborer to produce what Mr. Edison or Mr. Hill or even the average
deviser of work and guide of labor does. Then even ideal ethics
cannot say in this actual world: Let both have the same. That would
simply be Robin Hood ethics: rob the man who produces much, and
give the plunder to the man who produces little. Hence comes the
disguising of the schemes to do it, even so that they often deceive
their own devisers. What then do practical ethics say? They
can’t say anything more than: Help the less capable to become
capable, so that he may produce more. But that is at least as slow
a process as raising the servant beyond the stage of tips. Meantime
the socialists are unwilling to wait, and propose to rob the
present owners of the means of production, and take the control of
industry from the [pg 28]men who manage it now, and put it in the
hands of the men who merely can influence votes. These men
certainly are no less selfish and dishonest than the captains of
industry, and are vastly less able to select the profitable fields
of industry, and organize and economize industry; whatever product
they might squeeze out would be vastly less than now, and it would
stick to their own fingers no less than does what the politicians
handle now. Dividing whatever might reach the people, without
reference to those who produced it, could yield the average man no
more than he gets now. That’s very simple mathematics. One of
the saddest sights of the day is the number of good people to whom
these facts are not self-evident.

In no state of human nature that any persons now living, or the
grandchild of any person now living, will witness, could such
conditions be permanent. Their temporary realization might be
accomplished; but if it were, the able men would not be satisfied
with either the low grade of civilization inevitable unless they
worked, or with being robbed of the large share of production that
must result from their work. The more intelligent of the rank and
file, too, would rebel against the conditions inevitably lowering
the general prosperity, and they would soon realize the difference
in industrial leadership between “political generals”
and natural generals. Insurrection would follow, and then anarchy,
after which things would start again on their present basis, but
some generations behind.

But I for one do not expect these experiences, especially in
America: for here probably enough men have already become property
holders to make a sufficient balance of power for the preservation
of property. If not, the first step toward ensuring civilization,
is helping enough men to develop into property holders, and
continue property holders, which general experience
declares that they will not unless they develop their property
themselves.

[pg
29]

An Experiment in
Syndicalism

Return to Table of
Contents

During the last twenty years New Zealand has tried many social
and economic experiments; these experiments have been made by her
own Legislature, and her own people; and as a rule they have been
remarkably successful: during the last few months she has had the
experience of a new one conducted by strangers, and made at her
expense. Fortunately there is reason to believe that this one will
be found to have resulted in benefit to New Zealand and its people,
while it may prove of service to older and larger countries. It is
probable that the most widely known of New Zealand’s
experiments is that which aimed at doing justice to employers and
employees alike by the substitution for the Industrial strike of a
Court of Arbitration, fairly constituted, on which both Workers and
Employers were equally represented. This law has been branded by
the supporters of the usual Strike policy with the name of
“Compulsory Arbitration,” the object being to discredit
it in the eyes of the workers, as an infringement of their liberty.
The title is unfair and misleading. Unlike most laws, it never has
been of universal application either to Workers or Employers, but
only to those among them that chose to form themselves into
industrial Unions, and to register those Unions as subject to the
provisions of the Statute. The purpose of the Statute was an appeal
to the common sense of the people, by offering them an alternative
method of settling disputes and securing that fair-play for both
parties which experience had shown could seldom be secured by the
strike. The law, which was first introduced in 1894, had gradually
appealed both to workers and employers, as worth trying, and before
the close of the last century it [pg 30]had rendered the
country prosperous, and had attracted the attention of thoughtful
people in many other parts of the world to the “Country
Without Strikes.” Efforts were made in several countries to
introduce the principle of the New Zealand Statute, but with very
little success, as it was generally opposed both by workers and
employers:—the workers feeling confident they could obtain
greater concessions by the forceful methods of the strike, and the
employers suspecting that any Court of Arbitration would be likely
to give the workers more than, without arbitration, they could
compel the employers to surrender.

In the mean time the statutory substitute for the strike
continued to succeed in New Zealand. Nearly every class of town
workers, and some in the country, had formed Unions, and registered
them under the arbitration law. With a single trifling exception,
that was speedily put an end to by the punishment of the Union with
the alternative of heavy fine or imprisonment, the country was
literally as well as nominally a country without a strike. And it
was something more than that: its prosperity increased year by
year, and its production of goods—agricultural, pastoral, and
manufactured—increased at a pace unequalled elsewhere. Yet
the prosperity was most apparent in its effect on the conditions of
the workers: under the successive awards of the arbitration court,
wages had steadily increased until they had reached a point as high
as in similar trades in America, while the cost of living was very
little more than half the rate in any town in the United States. To
all intelligent observers these facts were evident, and could not
be concealed from the workers in other countries, especially in
Australia, as the nearest geographically to New Zealand and
commercially the most closely connected.

The effect, however, on the workers of Australia was not what
might have been expected. Attempts had been made by some of the
State Legislatures to introduce arbitration [pg 31]laws more or less
like the New Zealand statute, but with very partial success. From
the first these laws were opposed by the leaders of the Labor
Unions, who naturally saw a menace to their influence in the fact
that they became subject to punishment if they attempted to use
their accustomed powers over their fellow unionists. The example of
New Zealand was lauded in the Australian Legislatures and
newspapers, and even in the courts, till at last a feeling of
strong antagonism was developed among the more advanced class of
socialistic Labor men, and it was decided by their leaders to
undertake a campaign in the neighboring Dominion against the system
of settling industrial questions by courts, and in favor of
substituting the system of strikes, with their attendant power and
profit to the Labor leaders. The first steps taken were sending men
from Australia or England on lecturing tours through New Zealand,
to create dissatisfaction with the Arbitration Courts by
representing them as leaning to the side of the employers, and
ignoring the claims of the workers. When this had gone on for about
a year, workers of various classes were induced to cross from
Australia, and join the Unions in New Zealand, for the purpose of
influencing their fellow unionists to disloyalty towards the system
under which they were registered. These men were generally
competent workers and clever agitators, and many of them soon
obtained prominence and official position in the Unions. As was
natural, a good many of these new-comers were miners—either
for coal or gold—and many of them joined the miners’
union at the great gold mine known as the Waihi, from which upwards
of thirty million dollars worth of gold had been dug, and which was
still yielding between three and four million dollars a year. There
were nearly a thousand miners employed there, and all of them were
members of a Union that was duly registered under the Arbitration
statute.

There had been several questions in dispute between [pg 32]the
miners and the owners, and these had been referred to the
Arbitration Court some time before the arrival of the new
Australian miners. The result, while it favored the Union in some
respects, favored the Company in others, and this fact was used by
the new-comers to convince the older hands that the Court had been
unfair, and that they could secure much better terms for themselves
if they would cease work, and so inflict immense loss by permitting
the lower levels of the mine to become flooded. After a few months
the Union decided to take advantage of the provision of the law
which enabled any registered Union to withdraw its registration at
six months’ notice. When the time had expired, the Union
repeated the demand which had been refused by the Court, and on the
refusal of the Company to agree, a strike was at once declared, and
the whole of the miners ceased work. This had the effect, within a
very short time, of rendering all the deeper levels of the mine
unworkable. Close to the mine was a prosperous little town occupied
chiefly by the miners and their families, most of the houses being
the property of the mining company, and the men continued to occupy
the houses while the strike was in progress. Other miners were
found who were ready to take their places, but the men in
possession refused to move out, and threatened with violence any
miners that should attempt to work the mine. The men who had been
prepared to work, finding this to be the position, withdrew. As
there was no actual violence shown, there seemed to be a difficulty
in the way of any interference by the Government: so several months
passed, during which the mine lay idle while the miners on strike
continued to occupy the houses and pay the very moderate rents
demanded from employees of the company. This they were able to do
partly from their savings, partly from the sympathetic
contributions from Australia, and partly by some of the miners
having scattered over the country and got work on the farms, and
throwing their earnings into the common fund.

[pg
33]After repeated appeals by the mine-owners to the
Government, an arrangement was made that the Company should employ
miners willing to become members of a new Union registered under
the Arbitration statute, and that the Government should send a
police force sufficient to protect these in working the mine, and
also to enforce the judgment of the local court in dispossessing
the occupants of the houses belonging to the Company. An attempt
was made by the strikers to defy this police force and prevent the
new Union from working the mine; but when most of the new unionists
had been sworn in as special constables, and a number of the
militant strikers had been arrested, the others saw that they could
not continue the struggle, and within a week or two abandoned the
district, giving place to the members of the arbitration Union in
both the mine and town.

Thus the first strike organized by the “Federation of
Labor” in New Zealand resulted in a failure, but the miners
thus defeated and driven from the little town that had been their
home, in many cases for a good many years, were naturally
embittered by their failure, and became an element of mischief in
other districts, and especially in the coal mines, to which they
turned when they found it hard to obtain employment in any of the
gold mines.

The Australian Federation of Labor and its branch in New Zealand
fully appreciated the fact that their first attempt to establish a
system of Unionism opposed to the one recognized by the law, having
proved a failure, it was necessary either to give up the attempt
altogether or to make it more deliberately and on a much wider
scale. The method they adopted was one that did credit to their
foresight and determination. The Australian Federation is, and has
always been, highly socialistic in its policy, and latterly its
leaders have adopted and preached syndicalism, as promising to give
the workers the control of society. New Zealand, alone among
self-governing countries, having struck at the very root of their
policy by [pg 34]trying to substitute a statute and a Court
for the will of the associated workers, was a very tempting country
for syndicalism. An island country which, owing to climate and
soil, was specially suited for the production of all kinds of
agricultural wealth beyond the needs of its own people, must depend
on free access to the ports of other countries. This, it seemed
plain, could be prevented by well managed syndicalism. It would be
only necessary to organize the seamen who worked the vessels that
kept the smaller harbors of such a country in touch with the larger
ports at which the ocean going ships loaded and unloaded; and to
organize also the stevedores at the larger ports. The bitterness of
feeling that had followed the destruction of the Waihi Union, and
the loss to its members not only of a good many months of good
wages but of the homes they and their families had occupied for
years, was a valuable asset in such a campaign. At first, of
course, some of the working classes blamed the agents of “The
Federation of Labor” who were responsible for the disastrous
strike, but it was not difficult to turn attention from the past
failure of a single strike, to the certain success that must attend
a great syndical strike that would involve all the industries of
the country. Most, indeed nearly all, of the disappointed Waihi
strikers were ready to join with enthusiasm in carrying out the
plans of The Federation, and removed to the places where they could
be most effective in preparing the way for what they looked upon as
a great revenge. Thus they either joined the old Unions at the
principal ports, especially Auckland and Wellington, or formed new
Unions, no longer registered under the Arbitration statute, but
openly affiliated to The Federation of Labor, which had been
established in New Zealand, but was really a branch of the
Australian Federation. The four principal ports of New Zealand,
indeed the only ports much frequented by the large export and
import vessels, are Auckland, Wellington, Lyttleton, and Dunedin,
the two first named being in the north island, [pg 35]and the other
two in the south. Auckland is considerably the largest city in The
Dominion, containing at least 25,000 more inhabitants than
Wellington, which is not only the capital of the Dominion, but also
the great distributing centre for the South island and the southern
part of the North island, at the southern extremity of which it is
situated. The remarkable situation of Auckland, on a very narrow
isthmus about a hundred and eighty miles from the northern point of
the country, is no doubt largely responsible for the growth of the
city, which is the chief centre of the young manufactures of the
Dominion, and the largest port of export for almost all the country
produces, except wool and mutton, which are mainly raised in the
South island. Thus it happens that Auckland and Wellington are at
present the chief shipping ports of the Dominion, and it was to
them that the Federation of Labor turned its chief attention when
its leaders had definitely decided to undertake the campaign of
syndicalism against the system of arbitration which had prevailed
for sixteen years.

There had already been formed Unions of Waterside Workers and
Seamen at each of these ports; but they were in all cases
registered under the arbitration law, and of course subject to its
penalties against both officials and members in cases of any breach
of the statute. The Federation’s agents proceeded to collect
the members of these unions who were in any way dissatisfied with
the existing awards of the Arbitration Courts, and to form them
into new Unions outside the statute. They had little difficulty in
persuading the men that the new Unions would be free to act in many
directions that were barred to the members of the old Unions. A
good many of the men were thus persuaded to resign their membership
in the existing Unions, and as they were very often the most active
members, they gradually persuaded others to leave with them. There
was nothing either in the law or custom of the ports to prevent
unionists and non-unionists working [pg 36]together on the
wharves or the coasting vessels; so within a comparatively short
time the members of the new Federation Unions were more numerous
than those that clung to the older ones. When this became the case,
the officials of the new Unions approached the shipping companies
with proposals for an agreement between them and the Federation
Unions in some respects more favorable to the employers than the
arbitration award under which the older Unions were working, and in
this way gained a position which enabled them to undermine the old
Unions, till they either died out for want of members or withdrew
their registration, and at the end of their six months’
notice merged their Unions in those of The Federation. The
Federation’s plans had been so carefully prepared that there
was little or no suspicion on the part of the employers or of the
public generally as to the true meaning of the movement. It was
evident, of course, that it indicated a revolt against the
arbitration law, but as the new unions appeared ready to give the
employers rather better terms than the old ones, many reasons were
found by employers for defending what began to be called the
“Free Unions.” In this way things had gone on at the
shipping ports for about two years from the failure of the gold
miners’ strike at Waihi, before anything happened to open the
eyes of the public to the real meaning of what The Federation of
Labor had been doing. In that time the new Unions at each of the
principal ports of the country had quietly obtained the entire
control of the hands at waterside and local shipping, as well as of
the Carters Unions. The time had arrived when the syndicalists
believed themselves able to compel the public to submit to any
demands they might see fit to make.

The occasion finally arose, as might have been expected, at
Wellington, where the Federation of Labor had established its
head-quarters. There was no definite dispute between the employers
and workers, but for a few weeks there had been an uneasy feeling
in relation to the Waterside [pg 37]Workers who, it
was said, were growing more lazy and slovenly in handling cargo on
the wharves and piers. A meeting had been called by The Federation
to discuss some grievances of the coal miners at Westport, from
which most of the coal landed in Wellington is brought. The meeting
was called for the noon dinner hour, and a number of the waterside
workers engaged in discharging cargo from a steamer about to sail,
at once went to the meeting, and did not return to work in the
afternoon. The shipping company at once engaged other men to finish
their work, and when the men came back some hours later, they found
their places filled up. The new men belonged to the same Union, but
the men dispossessed demanded that the new ones should be dismissed
at once. When the company refused the demand, the men appealed to
the Council of the Federation, who at once called on the Waterside
Workers and Seamens Unions at Wellington to cease work. Within a
few days the position looked so serious that the Premier invited
both parties to a conference, at which he presided in person, in
the hope of bringing about an agreement to refer the matters in
dispute to an arbitrator to be mutually agreed upon. The officials
of The Federation, however, said there was nothing to submit to an
arbitrator: they had made a demand, and unless it was complied with
by the shipping company and the Union of merchants at Wellington
who were in league with the Company in victimizing the men who took
part in the meeting in aid of the Coal-miners, the strike must go
on. The Merchants and Shipping Company’s Unions pointed out
that what had been done was in direct opposition to the terms of
the formal agreement signed less than a year before, and they
refused to have anything more to do with the Federation on any
terms. The conference thus ended in an open declaration of war. The
time had evidently come for the Federation of Labor to make good
the assertions so often made by its lecturers and agitators, of its
power to force the rest of the community to submission. It would be
[pg
38]difficult to imagine a more favorable position for
carrying such a policy into effect: New Zealand, it must be borne
in mind, is a country without an army. For some years past, it is
true, a system of military training for all her young men between
eighteen and twenty-five has been enforced by law, but except for
training purposes, there is no military force in the Dominion,
either of regulars or militia; and it is now forty-five years since
the last company of British soldiers left its shores. Law has been
maintained, and order enforced, by a police force under the control
of the Government of the Dominion, and while the force is
undoubtedly a good and trustworthy one, its numbers have never been
large in proportion to the population. This year the entire force
throughout the country is very little more than 850, which includes
officers as well as men. It can hardly be wondered at that the
officials of The Federation of Labor were convinced that, if they
could arrange a general strike of the workers, the police force
would be powerless to deal with it. On the failure of the attempt
of the Premier to bring about a settlement between the parties by
arbitration, the Federation proclaimed a general strike of all
Unions affiliated to themselves throughout the country, and of all
other Unions that were in sympathy with them in their policy of
giving united Labor the control of society. The order to cease work
was at once obeyed, as a matter of course, by all the Federation
Unions, which practically meant all the workers engaged on vessels
registered in the Dominion and trading on the coast, all workers on
wharves and piers, carters in the cities, and coal miners
throughout the country. The appeal for sympathetic assistance from
Unions unconnected with the Federation was largely successful in
the chief centres, though it was, of course, a direct defiance of
the arbitration law under which they were registered. It has since
been discovered that in nearly every case it was brought about by
the unprincipled scheming of the secretaries, assisted by a few of
the officials, who called [pg 39]meetings, of which
notice was given only to a selected minority, and at which the
question of joining a sympathetic strike was settled by a large
majority of those present, but in fact in many cases a small
minority of the whole membership. The sympathetic strike of
Arbitration Unions was mainly confined to the cities, and Auckland,
as the largest city, was the most affected by it. In Auckland the
members of practically every Union ceased work, somewhere about ten
thousand persons going on strike simultaneously.

The result during the first days of the strike seemed likely to
confirm the expectations of the Federation orators. Industry was
practically dead. At every port vessels lay at anchor, having been
withdrawn from the wharves before they were deserted by their
crews, and the wharves were in the possession of the Waterside
strikers. The streets of the cities were empty, and a large
proportion of the stores were closed, partly owing to want of
business, and partly from fear of violence in case they kept open.
These first few days in both New Zealand and Australia were days of
triumph for the Federation leaders but the triumph was a
short-lived one. The Government of the Dominion did not interfere,
indeed, but the public, through their municipal authorities, did.
The people of New Zealand have throughout their history been
accustomed to manage their own affairs, and within four days of the
declaration of war by the syndical Federation, steps were taken to
meet the emergency. At Auckland and Wellington it had been evident
from the first that the small police force available could not
safely attempt to cope with the main body of strikers, or do more
than prevent acts of aggressive violence to the citizens and their
property. The local authorities, however, had confidence in the
general public, and at Auckland, and afterwards at Wellington, the
Mayor of the city appealed to the public to come forward as
volunteers to maintain law and order, by acting as Special
Constables. In both cities the appeal [pg 40]was responded to
readily, nearly two thousand young men coming forward at Auckland
in twenty-four hours, and upwards of a thousand at Wellington.
These were at once sworn in as special constables, and armed with
serviceable batons, while all the fire-arms and ammunition for sale
in the city was taken charge of and withdrawn from sale by the
municipal authorities. In this way the maintenance of order was
fairly provided for, and the temporary closing of all licensed
hotels by order of the city magistrates removed the danger of riot
as the result of intemperance.

There had been some rioting in Wellington, though with little
serious injury, but there was nothing that could be called a riot
in Auckland. The Federation Unions waited, under the impression
that time was on their side, owing to the impossibility of doing
anything or getting anything done without the help of the
associated workers. This had been the basis of their scheme, but
like all such schemes it failed to take into account the instinct
of self-preservation on the part of the people outside the Unions.
As long as the strike leaders could point to the fleet of vessels
lying idle in the harbor, the mills silent, and the street
railroads without a moving car, and almost deserted by carts, it
was easy for them to persuade their followers that complete victory
was only a matter of days, or at most of weeks; they had not
remembered that there were others besides themselves and their
fellow townsmen interested in the question of a paralyzed industry.
The trade that has been making the people of New Zealand
increasingly rich during the last twenty years has been mainly
derived from the land. Small holdings and close settlement have
been the rule, and the rate of production has been increasingly
rapid. The exports—mainly the produce of the land—have
grown in proportions quite unknown in any other country, and the
farmers knew that the prosperity of the country, and most directly
of all the workers on the land, depended on the freedom and
facilities for shipment of their ports. It was the workers on the
[pg
41]land, accordingly, that came to the rescue, and solved
the industrial problem. An offer was made by the President of The
Farmers’ Cooperative Union to bring a sufficient number of
the members into the cities to work the shipping and to prevent any
interruption of the work by the men on strike. The offer was at
once accepted by the municipal authorities at Auckland and
Wellington, and within two days fully eighteen hundred mounted
farmers rode into Auckland, and nearly a thousand into Wellington,
all prepared to carry on the work and protect the workers. Their
arrival practically settled the question. New Waterside Unions were
formed at every port, and registered under the provisions of the
Arbitration Statute; such of the country workers as were able to do
so, enrolled themselves as members of the new Unions; the wharves
and water fronts were taken possession of and guarded by the
special constables enlisted in the cities, while the streets were
patrolled by parties of the mounted volunteers. Within twenty-four
hours of their arrival, some of the vessels in harbor had been
brought to the wharves, and the work of unloading them was
begun.

At first there were many threats of violent opposition on the
part of the strikers, and crowds assembled in the principal streets
and in the neighborhood of the wharves; but these were dispersed
before they became dangerous, by the mounted constables, and a
proclamation having been issued by the mayor calling attention to
the fact that collections of people that obstructed traffic in the
streets were contrary to law, the police and mounted constables
cleared the streets, and forcibly arrested any persons who
attempted opposition. Within two or three days, at each of the
principal cities, new Unions of seamen and of carters had been
formed and registered under the arbitration law, and those members
of the old Federation Unions who were not enthusiastic, and began
to see that the assurances of success were not likely to be
realized, began to resign and apply for admission to the new
Unions. After about [pg 42]two weeks the Council of The Federation of
Labor, recognizing the failure of the sympathetic strike, invited
the Unions that were not connected with them to declare the strike
at an end, and tried by confining the strike to their own members,
to maintain a solid front, which, with the help of the Australian
Federation both in money for the strikers and in refusing to handle
any goods either from or for New Zealand, they still hoped would
carry them to at least a compromise, if not to the victory they had
expected. The hopes of the Federation of Labor were not realized.
Within a week or two a large proportion of the members of their own
Unions, seeing their places filled, and their work being done, not
by free labor, which they might hope to deal with, but by new
Unions, whose members would be entitled, under the arbitration law,
to preference and many other privileges, began to desert and to
seek admission to the Arbitration Unions that had taken their
place. For a time this was fiercely denied by the Federation
officials, but as the days went on, and business of every kind was
resumed in the cities, the groups of strikers at street corners and
around the Federation head-quarters dwindled away; the hotels were
reopened, the shops and stores were busy, the mills were at work,
and even the coastal steamers were manned and running, and the
federationists were forced to admit that they were hopelessly
defeated. For a time they still hoped that the Australian Boycott
might save them from absolute disaster, and the Labor Ministry of
New South Wales tried to help the Federation by making an appeal to
the New Zealand Government to arrange an arbitration to settle the
dispute between The Wellington Waterside Workers and the merchants
and shipping companies. The absolute refusal of the New Zealand
Government to recognize The Federation of Labor, or to interfere
with the new Unions under the Arbitration Act that had taken their
place, finally settled the question, and completed the defeat of
the strikers. The officials of the Federation [pg 43]declared the
strike at an end, and the Australian Federation announced that the
boycott was also at an end.

At first sight it may seem that, after all, the experiment in
syndicalism was on a small scale, and that its lesson can hardly be
of great value to a country like America. A little consideration
may correct such a misapprehension. New Zealand was deliberately
selected by the Syndicalists as a test case, for two reasons. In
the first place it was the only country that had for years adopted
a policy of justice according to law for both workers and
employers, and from the syndicalist’s point of view it was
therefore the only country that seriously attacked their own policy
by showing that it was unnecessary. In the second place New Zealand
was the only country with a population of British origin that could
be dealt with practically by itself. With the aid of an Australian
boycott it seemed as if her people must be helpless in the hands of
the Federation. The result proved to be not only the defeat of the
principle of lawless syndicalism, but the destruction of the
industrial association that represented it in the country. No
compromise was accepted, and except it may be in name, no Union
attached to the Federation of Labor remains at work. The question,
of course, suggests itself: What was the reason? Minor reasons may
be found, no doubt, to account for failure where success was so
confidently expected; but there can be little doubt that the real
cause is the policy pursued by the Legislature and people of New
Zealand for the last twenty years. Syndicalism, like all plans for
the over turn, or reform, as their advocates would perhaps prefer
to call it, of existing institutions, depends for success on the
existence of wrongs by which part of the people is impoverished,
while another, and very small part, has more than enough. The
workers of our own race, at any rate, have enough common-sense to
understand, at least when they are not hysterically excited, that
imaginary wrongs are not a sufficient reason for great sacrifices.
[pg
44]New Zealand’s legislation has not created an ideal
society, it is true; but for twenty years it has proceeded step by
step in the direction of righting the wrongs of the past, and
giving opportunity to that part of its people that needed it most,
on the single condition that they would use it, and respect the
rights of others. To such a people, increasing steadily, year by
year, in all that makes for well-being, the wild denunciations, and
if possible wilder promises, of paid agitators can have little
attraction. It may be possible by careful generalship to stir a
small section of such a people to the hysterical excitement of an
industrial war, but the mass of the people would be certain to
resent it, and the movement will be doomed to a speedy
collapse.

Other countries have been less enlightened and less fortunate
than New Zealand in their legislation, and perhaps still less
fortunate in the administration of the laws passed for the
betterment of the masses of their people. They have done little to
convince the great majority that they are aware of the wrongs that
have been done that majority in the supposed interest of the small
class of the over rich. They have not provided opportunity for
those who hitherto have had none, nor have they even provided a
reasonable alternative for industrial warfare. Had they done these
things in the past, or were they even to begin honestly to provide
for them in the future, they might confidently expect that the
reign of industrial warfare, which exasperates their people, and
retards the prosperity of their nation, would be as easily and
effectually suppressed as the experiment of the Syndicalists has
just been in New Zealand.

[pg
45]

Labor: “True Demand”
and Immigrant Supply

A Restatement of the Economic Aspects of Immigration
Policy

Return to Table of
Contents

Recent historians and economists have been showing that it was
anything but pure and unadulterated sense of brotherhood that
prompted many of our forefathers’ fine speeches about opening
the doors of America to the down-trodden and oppressed of Europe.
Emerson, fifty years ago, in his essay on Fate noted the
current exploitation of the immigrant: “The German and Irish
millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their
destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over
America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to
lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the
prairie.” Indeed it would not be hard to show that there was
always a real or potential social surplus back of our national
hospitality to the alien.

The process began long before our great nineteenth century era
of industrial expansion. Colonial policies with regard to the
immigrant varied according to latitude and longitude. Most of the
New England colonies viewed the foreigner with distrust as a menace
to Puritan theocracy. New York, Pennsylvania, and some of the
Southern colonies were much more hospitable, for economic reasons.
That this hospitality sometimes resembled that of the spider to the
fly is evident from observations of contemporary writers. That it
included whites as well as negroes in its ambiguous welcome is
equally evident.

John Woolman writes in his Journal (1741-2): “In
a few months after I came here my master bought several [pg
46]Scotchmen as servants, from on board a vessel, and
brought them to Mount Holly to sell.” Isaac Weld, traveling
in the United States in the last decade of the eighteenth century,
noted methods of securing aliens in the town of York, Pennsylvania:
“The inhabitants of this town as well as those of Lancaster
and the adjoining country consist principally of Dutch and German
immigrants and their descendants. Great numbers of these people
emigrate to America every year and the importation of them forms a
very considerable branch of commerce. They are for the most part
brought from the Hanse towns and Rotterdam. The vessels sail
thither from America laden with different kinds of produce and the
masters of them on arriving there entice as many of these people on
board as they can persuade to leave their native country, without
demanding any money for their passages. When the vessel arrives in
America an advertisement is put into the paper mentioning the
different kinds of people on board whether smiths, tailors,
carpenters, laborers, or the like and the people that are in want
of such men flock down to the vessel. These poor Germans are then
sold to the highest bidder and the captain of the vessel or the
ship holder puts the money into his pocket.”

These may be, it is true, extreme cases of the economic motive
for immigration. But they are quite in line with eighteenth century
Mercantilist economic philosophy. Josiah Tucker, for example, in
his Essay on Trade, 1753, urges the encouragement of
immigration from France, and cites the value of Huguenot refugees.
“Great was the outcry against them at their first coming.
Poor England would be ruined! Foreigners encouraged! And our own
people starving! This was the popular cry of the times. But the
looms in Spittle-Fields, and the shops on Ludgate-Hill have at last
sufficiently taught us another lesson … these
Hugonots have … partly got, and partly saved, in
the space of fifty years, a balance in our favour of, at least,
fifty millions sterling…. And as England and [pg 47]France are
rivals to each other, and competitors in almost all branches of
commerce, every single manufacturer so coming over, would be our
gain, and a double loss to France.”

The obverse side of the case appears in British hindrances to
the free emigration of artisans during the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. Laws forbade any British subject who had been
employed in the manufacture of wool, cotton, iron, brass, steel, or
any other metal, of clocks, watches, etc., or who might come under
the general denomination of artificer or manufacturer, to leave his
own country for the purpose of residing in a foreign country out of
the dominion of His Britannic Majesty. Recall the difficulty early
American manufacturers encountered in introducing new English
improvements in cotton manufacture; a virtual embargo was laid upon
the migration of either men or machinery. Recall, too, an
expression of American resentment in our Declaration of
Independence at this English attitude: “He has endeavored to
prevent the population of these states; for that purpose,
obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners, refusing to
pass others to encourage migration hither, and raising the
conditions of new appropriations of lands.”

On the whole, the economic motive seems to have been uppermost
in the minds of both those who fostered and those who opposed
foreign immigration into the United States, up to, say, 1870.
Likewise in perhaps more than ninety-nine of every hundred cases
the economic motive holds in the mind of the present day immigrant,
or his protagonist. Escape from political tyranny or religious
persecution, at least since the revolutionary period of 1848, has
operated only as a secondary motive. The industrial impulse is all
the more striking in the so-called “new immigration”
from the Mediterranean and South-Eastern Europe. The temporary
migrant laborer, the “bird of passage,” roams about
seeking his fortunes in [pg 48]much the same
spirit that certain Middle Age Knights or Crusades camp followers
sought theirs. This is in no way to his discredit. It is simply a
fact that we are to reckon with when called upon to work out a
satisfactory immigration policy. At least its recognition would
eliminate a good deal of wordy sentimentality from discussions of
the immigration problem.

Professor Fairchild discovered that three things attract the
Greek immigrant. First and foremost, financial opportunities.
Second, corollary to the first, citizenship papers which will
enable him to return to Turkey, there to carry on business under
the greater protection which such citizenship confers. There is a
hint here to the effect that mere naturalization does not mean
assimilation and permanent acceptance of the status and
responsibilities of American citizenship. Third, enjoyment of
certain more or less factitious “comforts of
civilization.”

But the Greeks are by no means untypical. The conclusion of the
Immigration Commission as to the causes of the new immigration is
that while “social conditions affect the situation in some
countries, the present immigration from Europe to the United States
is in the largest measure due to economic causes. It should be
stated, however, that emigration from Europe is not now an absolute
economic necessity, and as a rule those who emigrate to the United
States are impelled by a desire for betterment rather than by the
necessity of escaping intolerable conditions. This fact should
largely modify the natural incentive to treat the immigration
movement from the standpoint of sentiment, and permit its
consideration primarily as an economic problem. In other words, the
economic and social welfare of the United States should now
ordinarily be the determining factor in the immigration policy of
the Government.”

This delimitation of the immigration problem to its economic
aspects led the Immigration Commission to recommend a somewhat
restrictionist policy. That they [pg 49]were not without
warrant in so delimiting it is evident from the utterances of such
ardent opponents of restriction as Dr. Peter Roberts and Max J.
Kohler. The latter, writing in the American Economic
Review (March, 1912) said: “In fact, the immigrant
laborer is indispensable to our economic progress today, and we can
rely upon no one else to build our houses, railroads and subways,
and mine our ores for us.” Dr. Roberts’ plea is almost
identical.

What a glaring misconception of the whole economic and social
problem is here involved will appear if we add a clause or two to
Mr. Kohler’s sentence. He should have said: “We can
rely upon no one else to build our houses, railroads and subways,
and mine our ores for us at $455 a year; for workers of native
birth but of foreign fathers would cost us $566, and native born
White Americans $666 a year.” (See Abstracts of Rep. of
Immigr. Comm. vol. i., pp. 405-8.) These are the facts. This is the
social situation as it should be stated if a candid discussion of
the problem is sought.

Now what are the economic arguments for restricting somewhat the
tide of immigration? Several studies of standards of living among
American workingmen within the past ten years have shown that a
large proportion of American wage earners fall below a minimum
efficiency standard. Studies of American wages indicate that only a
little over ten per cent of American wage earners receive enough to
maintain an average family in full social efficiency. The average
daily wage for the year ranges from $1.50 to $2. One-half of all
American wage earners get less than $600 a year; three-quarters
less than $750; only one-tenth more than $1,000.

Take in connection with these wage figures the statistics for
unemployment. The proportion of idleness to work ranges from
one-third in mining industries to one-fifth in other industries. In
Massachusetts, 1908, manufacturers were unemployed twelve per cent
of the working time. [pg 50]Professor
Streightoff estimated three years ago that the average annual loss
in this country through unemployment is 1,000,000 years of working
time. Perhaps one-tenth of working time might be taken as a very
conservative general average loss. But the worst feature of the
whole problem is that, in certain industries at least, the tendency
to seasonal unemployment is increasing. Ex-Commissioner Neill in
his report on the Lawrence strike said: “… it is a
fact that the tendency in many lines of industry, including
textiles, is to become more and more seasonal and to build to meet
maximum demands and competitive trade conditions more effectively.
This necessarily brings it about that a large number of
employés are required for the industry during its period of
maximum activity who are accordingly of necessity left idle during
the period of slackness.” (Senate Document 870, 62d Cong., 2d
sess., 1912.)

If we recall still further that the casual laborer, who suffers
most from seasonal unemployment, is the chief stumbling block in
the way to a solution of the problem of poverty; that he furnishes
the human power in “sweated trades:” that immigrants
form the majority of unskilled and sweated laborers; if we remember
that there is not a shred of evidence (except the well-meant
enthusiasm of the protagonists of the immigrant) to show that
immigration has “forced-up” the American laborer and
his standard of living, instead of displacing him downward; if we
remember that probably 10,000,000 of our people are in poverty, and
that though the immigrant may not seek charity in any larger
proportions than the poor of native stock, yet he does contribute
heavily to our burden of relief for dependents and defectives: we
are justified in assuming that an analysis of the causes of poverty
confirms the evidence from studies of wages and standards of living
as to the depressing effect of the new immigration, in particular,
upon working conditions for the American laborer.

[pg
51]Consider, too, the question of “social
surplus.” Several American economists, among them Professors
Hollander, Patten and Devine, agree that we are creating annually
in the United States a substantial social surplus. But it is
evident from the figures of wages and standards of living quoted
above that the American laborer is not participating as he might
expect to participate in this economic advantage. Three factors
conspire against him. First, we have yet no adequate machinery for
determining exactly what the surplus is, or how to distribute it
equitably. Mr. Babson with his “composite statistical
charts” has made a beginning in the mathematical
determination of prosperity; but it is only a beginning. Second,
organized labor is not yet sufficiently organized nor sufficiently
self-conscious to perceive and demand its opportunity for a larger
share. The significant point here is that recent immigration has
hampered and hindered the development of labor organizations, and
thus indirectly held back the normal tendency of wages to rise.
Third, inadequate education, particularly economic and social
education. The adult illiterate constitutes a tremendous
educational problem. Over 35 per cent of the “new
immigration” of 1913 was illiterate, and this new immigration
included over two-thirds of the total. Ignorance prevents the
laborer from demanding the very education that would give him a
better place in the economic system; it hinders the play of
intelligent self-interest; and it actually prevents effective
labor-organization, which is one of the surest means of
labor-education. Jenks and Lauck, after experience with the
Immigration Commission, concluded that “the fact that recent
immigrants are usually of non-English speaking races, and their
high degree of illiteracy, have made their absorption by the labor
organizations very slow and expensive. In many cases, too, the
conscious policy of the employers of mixing the races in different
departments and divisions of labor, in order, by a diversity of
tongues, to prevent concerted action on the [pg 52]part of
employés, has made unionization of the immigrant almost
impossible.”

For these reasons, and others, we are driven to the conclusion
that future policies of immigration must be based on sound
principles of social welfare and social economy, and not upon the
economic advantage of certain special industries. Whether we want
the brawn of the immigrant must be determined by what it will
contribute to the general social surplus, and not by what it adds
to A’s railroads or B’s iron mines.

We are told that the three classes of our population demanding
unrestricted immigration are large employers of unskilled labor,
transportation companies, and revolutionary anarchists. Since this
is by definition an economic and not a philosophical question, we
may neglect the third class. To the other two classes should be
directed certain brief tests of economic good faith. Take at its
face value their claim that European brawn by the ship-load is
indispensable to American industry. It is becoming an accepted
maxim that industry should bear its own charges, should pay its own
way. American industry has long fought the contract-labor exclusion
feature in current immigration law. Suppose we frankly admit that
it is much better for the immigrant to come over here to a definite
job than to wander about for weeks after he arrives, a prey to
immigrant banks, fake employment agents, and other sharks. Suppose,
accordingly, we repeal the laws against contract-labor. Let the
employer contract for as many foreign laborers as he likes or says
he needs. But make the contractor liable for support and
deportation costs if the laborers become public charges. Also
require him to assume the cost of unemployment insurance. Exact a
bond for the faithful performance of these terms, guaranteed in
somewhat the same way that National Banks are safeguarded.
Immigration authorities now commonly require a bond from the
relatives of admitted aliens who seem likely to become public
charges, [pg 53]but who are allowed to enter with the
benefit of the doubt. Customs and revenue rules admit dutiable
goods in bond. Hence the principle of the bond is perfectly
familiar, and its application to contract-immigrants would be in no
sense an untried or dangerous experiment. It would establish no new
precedent: for precedents, and successful ones, are already
established, accepted and approved. It would be understood that all
admissions of aliens can be only provisional, with no time limit on
deportation. It would be understood further—and the plan
would work automatically if the contractor were made such a deeply
interested party—that intending immigrants must be rigidly
inspected, that they be required to produce consular certificates
of clean police record, freedom from chronic disease, insanity,
etc.

The result of such a scheme would probably cut away entirely
contract-labor; for it would not longer pay. But this does not mean
barring the gate to all foreign labor. As an aid to the employer
and to our own native workingman, we must, sooner or later, and the
sooner the better, establish a chain of labor bureaus throughout
the Union. The system must be placed under Federal direction,
largely because the Department of Labor would be charged, ex
officio, with ascertaining the “true demand” for
immigrant labor, and it could only accomplish this end effectively
through such an employment clearing system. This true demand would,
of course, be based not only upon mere numerical excess of calls
for labor over demands for jobs, but would also take into account
the nature of the work, working conditions, and above all the
prevailing level of wages. According to this true demand the
Department would adjust a sliding scale of admissions of immigrant
laborers.

Much might be said in favor of an absolute embargo upon all
immigration until such a body as the Industrial Relations
Commission has time to make an authoritative economic survey of the
whole country, or until the Unemployment [pg 54]Research
Commission recently called for by Miss Kellor could make the three
years’ study contemplated by her as the only way out of the
unemployment morass. Twenty years ago men of the type of General
Walker frankly urged that the immigration gates be closed for a
flat period of ten years or so. But the sliding scale plan
contemplates no such radical step. Indeed it is radical in no sense
whatever. The proposed immigration act now before Congress (The
Burnett Bill, H.R. 6060) paves the way for it, and provides a
working principle, which apparently is accepted on all sides.
Section 3 includes this clause: “That skilled labor, if
otherwise admissible, may be imported if labor of like kind
unemployed can not be found in this country, and the question of
the necessity of importing such skilled labor in any particular
instance may be determined by the Secretary of
Labor….” A really workable test for immigration,
superior by far to the literacy test or any other so far suggested,
might easily be developed by simply enlarging the scope of this
clause, making it include unskilled as well as skilled labor. No
machinery other than that contemplated by the present act would be
required.

The immigration problem can never be satisfactorily handled
until we fix upon some such means of determining just what the
economic need is. There is no danger of hindering legitimate
industrial expansion in times of sudden business prosperity: for
the transportation companies may be safely trusted to supply in
three or four weeks aliens enough to fill all the gaps in the
industrial army. Neither would injustice be done to the immigrant
himself. On the contrary, he would be assured of a job and
respectful consideration when he arrived. The “dago” or
the “bohunk” would acquire a new dignity and a more
enviable status than he now occupies. The selective process thus
involved would much improve the quality of the immigrant admitted,
and would incidentally render assimilation of the foreigner all the
easier.

[pg
55]The precise details of selection, and the machinery, are
mere matters of detail. But the consular service, as long ago
suggested by Catlin, Schuyler and others, seems to offer the proper
base of operations. We have already recommended charging consuls
with viséing certificates from police, medical, and
poor-relief authorities. We should further require that
declarations of intention to migrate be published (somewhat as
marriage banns are published) at local administrative centers
(arrondissement, Bezirk, etc.) and at United States consular
offices; the consular declaration should be obligatory; perhaps the
other might be optional, though in all probability foreign
governments would coöperate in demanding it. These validated
declarations of intention should be filed in the consular offices.
When notice comes from the United States Department of Labor that
so many laborers will be admitted from such and such district, the
declarations are to be taken up in the order of their filing, and
the proper number of persons certified for admission. The
apportionment of admissions from each country might be calculated
on a basis of its population, also upon the nature of the
employment offered, and upon the desirability of the alien himself,
his general assimilability, his willingness to become naturalized,
to adopt the English language and the American standard of living
among efficient workers, etc.,—all as proved by past
experience with his countrymen. This plan, in so far as it provides
for a sliding scale of admissions, is in line with that proposed by
Professor Gulick. He advocates making all nations eligible for
admission and citizenship, but would admit them only in proportion
as they can be readily assimilated. This would admit annually, say,
five per cent of those already naturalized, with their American
children. The principle here seems to be that we can assimilate
from any land in, and only in, proportion to the number already
assimilated from that land. But the difficulty of applying such a
test lies in the complexity of the assimilative [pg 56]process. No
measure yet exists for assimilation. Anthropologists are convinced
that various strains in the populations, for example of France, or
Great Britain, which have been dwelling together for centuries, are
not by any means assimilated. Mere naturalization is not a
sufficient test of assimilation; it is only the expression of a
desire to be assimilated; and it may only be a device for the
promotion of business success here or in foreign parts, as we have
already indicated in the case of the Greeks. Hence in working out
the basis of a sound immigration policy, it would seem more
practicable to consider first the question of economic utilization
rather than assimilation. This, of course, does not exclude from
the Secretary of Labor’s judgment the category of
assimilability as one of the factors in determining the
apportionment of admissions.

It will appear that the plan outlined above limits immigration
policy to purely national and economic considerations. But it is,
as matters now stand, a national question. And it must remain so
for some time to come, even if we are reproached with a narrow
Mercantilist economics. The admission of aliens is not yet a
fundamental international right, or duty; it is
only an example of comity within the family of nations.
And the matter must rest in this state of limbo until we develop
some institution or method of registering our sentiments of
internationalism, and especially of determining international
surplus. As it is idle to talk or dream of abolishing poverty
until at least the concept of social or national surplus is pretty
clearly fixed and its realization either actually at hand or fairly
imminent, just so is it vain to expect an international adjustment
of the immigration problem on economic grounds until the existence
of an international surplus is demonstrated, and the methods of
apportioning it worked out.

How soon we may expect these things it is not our province to
predict. It is too early to pass final judgment [pg 57]on Professor
Patten’s dictum that inter-racial coöperation is
impossible without integration, and that races must therefore stand
in hostile relations or finally unite. But it is perfectly apparent
that we have a long way to travel before the path to integration is
cleared. Such assemblages as the First Universal Races Congress
which met in London in 1911 can do much to prepare the way. But it
must not be forgotten that the German representative at that
Congress pleaded for the maintenance of strict racial and national
boundaries, and summed up his plea in the rather ominous sentence:
“The brotherhood of man is a good thing, but the struggle for
life is a far better one.” Meanwhile we need not anticipate
serious international difficulties in the way of the sliding-scale
plan; for foreign governments are watching the tide of immigration
with mixed feelings. They welcome the two or three hundred million
dollars sent home annually by alien residents in the United States.
But they also resent the dislocations of industry, the fallow
fields, the dodging of military service, and the disturbance of the
level of prices which such wholesale emigrations inflict upon the
mother country.

Since the protagonists of unrestricted immigration have taken
largely an economic line of argument, it seemed desirable to accept
their terms, and meet them on their own ground. But I should not
wish to be misunderstood as limiting the immigration question to
its economic phases. When we have said that the
latifondisti of Southern Italy are in despair at the
scarcity of laborers to work their lands at starvation wages, and
that the railway builders and mine operators of America are equally
anxious to have those selfsame South Italian laborers for their own
exploitive enterprises, we have told a bare half of the tale. There
remain all those cultural, educational, political, religious and
domestic variations and adjustments which make up the general
problem of assimilability of the alien and of the strength of our
own national digestion. America had a giant’s
undiscriminating appetite [pg 58]in the great days
of expansion from 1850 to 1890. But there are many signs, economic
and other, that we can no longer play Gargantua and continue a
healthy nation. An unwise engineer sometimes over-stokes his
boilers, and courts disaster. Is it not equally possible that
national welfare may suffer from an over-dose of human fuel in our
industry?

[pg
59]

The Way to Flatland

Return to Table of
Contents

“The next great task of preventive medicine is the
inauguration of universal periodic medical examinations as an
indispensable means for the control of all diseases, whether
arising from injurious personal habits, from congenital or
constitutional weakness, or from social and vocational
conditions.” That this declaration by the Commissioner of
Health of the city of New York is not the mere expression of an
individual opinion, there is abundant evidence. And no one who has
watched the growth of other movements towards such regulation of
life as only a few years ago would have seemed wholly outside the
domain of practical probability can doubt that the “Life
Extension” movement, as thus outlined, will rapidly grow into
prominence. Nor is there much room for doubt that, whether
explicitly contemplated at present or not, compulsion as well as
universality is tacitly implied in the movement.

I say that the movement is sure to grow into prominence, that it
is a thing which must be seriously reckoned with; I do not say that
it will march straight on to victory, or even that it is sure to
prevail in the end. It is instructive, in this regard, to hark back
to a recent experience in a more special, but yet an extremely
important, domain. Several years ago a report on university
efficiency was issued under the auspices—though, it should be
added, without the official endorsement—of the Carnegie
Foundation. The central feature of this report lay in its advocacy
of the application to universities of those principles of system
and of standardization which have been successfully applied on a
large scale to the promotion of industrial efficiency, and are
generally referred to by the catch-[pg 60]word,
“scientific management.” In spite of the merits of the
report in certain matters of detail, and of the high standing of
the expert who wrote it in his own department of industrial
engineering, the report evoked an almost universal chorus of
contemptuous rejection not only in university circles, but also
from those organs of public opinion which have any claim to be
regarded as enlightened judges in questions of education and
culture. The thing seemed to have been laughed out of court. And
yet it turned out that a year or two afterwards a full-fledged
scheme for carrying out some of the crudest and most objectionable
features of this “efficiency” program was presented to
the professors of Harvard University, apparently with the
expectation that they would fall in with its requirements without
hesitation or protest. For some days there seemed to be real danger
that this would actually happen. It turned out to be a false alarm;
the faculty of the foremost of American universities were guilty of
no such supineness. The project was ignominiously shelved, with
some sort of explanation that the springing of it on the professors
was due to an error or misunderstanding. But that the attempt
should have been made, and in a manner that argued so total a lack
of any sense of its grossness and crudity, is a significant warning
of the extent to which the notions underlying it have fastened upon
the general mind.

The story of the eugenics movement in this country affords a
striking illustration at once of the almost startling rapidity with
which innovating ideas as to the regulation of life gain
acceptance, and of the fact that this rapidity is by no means
conclusive proof that their progress will be continuous. The one
thing clear is that there is a large, active, and influential
element in the population that is extremely hospitable to such
ideas, and manifests a naïve, an almost childish, readiness to
put them into immediate execution. Since, in the nature of things,
this element is lively and active—since, too, what is novel
and [pg
61]in motion is more interesting than what is old and at
rest—at first there is almost sure to be produced a deceptive
appearance that the new thing is sweeping everything before it.
Just now there is evidently a lull in the onward march of
legislative eugenics. This is sufficient proof of the conservatism
of the people as a whole; we may be quite sure that anything beyond
a very restricted application of eugenical notions will take a long
time to get itself established in our laws or even in our customs.
Nevertheless, it would be a great mistake to suppose that even the
more extreme forms of eugenical doctrine are not forces to be
reckoned with as affecting practical possibilities of a not distant
future. Though no results may appear on the surface, the leaven is
working. It is consonant with tendencies which in so many
directions are becoming more and more dominant. So long as those
tendencies continue in anything like their present strength, there
can be little doubt that the idea of control in the direction of
eugenics, like that of the regulation of human life in other
fundamental respects, will continue to make headway, and may at any
time become one of the central issues of the day.

To adduce prohibition as an illustration of this same character
in the thought and the tendencies of our immediate time may seem
like forcing the point. It is true, it may be said, that there has
been within the past few years a rapid spread of prohibition in
almost every part of the country; but the thing itself is sixty
years old, has had its periods of advance and recession, and is
now, in the fullness of time, reaping the fruits of two generations
of agitation, investigation, and education. But to say this is to
overlook the distinctive feature of the present situation regarding
prohibition in the United States. A Constitutional amendment
providing for the complete prohibition of the sale of liquor
throughout the Union is pending in Congress. A year
ago—probably six months ago—there was hardly a human
being in the United States, [pg 62]other than those
in the councils of the Anti-saloon League, who had so much as
thought of national prohibition as a question of present-day
practical politics. Suddenly it is announced that there is a
distinct possibility of a prohibition amendment being passed by
Congress in the near future; and one of the foremost
representatives of the Anti-saloon League states, and with good
show of reason, that if the amendment be passed by Congress, its
ratification by the Legislatures of three fourths of the States can
be only a matter of time. What the probabilities actually are, I do
not undertake to say; neither am I concerned at this moment with
the merits of the issue itself. What I am concerned with
is the simple fact that in this situation, brought upon the country
with dramatic suddenness, nobody seems to have been in the least
startled, or so much as disturbed in his equanimity. There will of
course be a great struggle over the question, sooner or later. But
neither in Congress nor in the press has there as yet been any sign
of such an assertion of the claims of personal liberty as, at any
time previous to the past ten years, would have been sure to be
made in such a situation. This collective silence, on an issue
affecting so intimately the lives, the habits, the traditions of
millions of people, is, in my judgment, by far the most impressive
proof of the degree in which the public mind has grown accustomed
to the inroads of regulation upon the domain of individuality.

A number of years ago, when the mathematical concept of space of
more than three dimensions was attracting great popular interest,
an ingenious writer undertook to make the idea intelligible to
“the general” by picturing the state of mind in regard
to three dimensions of a race of beings whose life and whose
sensual experience was limited to space of two dimensions. He gave
his little book the title “Flatland,” and it gained
wide attention. In his Commencement address at Columbia last year,
President [pg 63]Butler had the happy thought of applying the
term in the characterization of certain aspects of the intellectual
and political life of our time. He was speaking particularly of
that absorption in the immediate problems of the day which makes
almost impossible a true study and contemplation of the lasting
concerns of mankind as embodied in history and literature.
“Every ruling tendency,” he said, “is to make
life a Flatland, an affair of two dimensions, with no depth, no
background, no permanent root.” That this is a literal truth
probably neither Dr. Butler nor anyone else would contend; but it
hits off with great force and with substantial accuracy the
prevailing character of thought in the circles most active and most
influential in almost every department of human activity at the
present time. And the tendency which President Butler describes as
arising out of our absorption in current problems is still more
manifest in the spirit of our actual dealings with those problems
themselves. On every hand we find a surprising readiness to accept
views which explicitly tend to take out of life that which gives it
depth and significance and richness. Each one of the four movements
we have mentioned affords an illustration of this: in following any
one of them we travel straight toward Flatland. They differ very
much, one from another; they have very different degrees and kinds
of justification; it may be difficult in the case of some of them
to strike a balance between the gain and the loss. The remarkable
thing—the ominous thing, if we are to suppose that the
present tone of thought will long persist—is that the loss
involved in the flattening of life, as such, apparently almost
wholly fails to get consideration. I say apparently, because there
is, no doubt, a deep and strong undercurrent of opposition which,
sooner or later, will manifest itself; in speaking of “ruling
tendencies” we are apt to mean merely the tendencies that are
most in evidence. But after all, it is to these that criticism of
contemporary life and thought must, of necessity, be chiefly
directed.

[pg
64]As I have already indicated, the attack on individuality
and personal dignity in the universities was met in a spirit that
is highly gratifying, and which is quite out of keeping with the
tendency that I am discussing and deploring. Yet it is doubtful
whether, outside the circle of the universities themselves, and of
those individuals who are thoroughly imbued with the university
spirit, there is any true realization of what it is that
constituted the head and front of that offending. If some bureau of
research were to present a formidable array of figures showing that
the “output” of professorial work could be increased by
so and so many per cent. through the adoption of some definitely
formulated system of “scientific management,” it is by
no means certain that the scheme would not receive powerful support
in the highest quarters of efficiency propaganda. We should be told
just how many millions of dollars a year we are spending on
university education, and just how many of these millions go
needlessly to waste. Even the opponents of the “reform”
would probably find themselves compelled to use as their most
powerful argument this and that example of great practical results
which have flowed from letting men of genius go their own way. It
would be pointed out that many an investigation which, to the
authorities of the time, appeared wholly unpromising, turned out to
be of cardinal value. We should be warned that what we gain in a
thousand cases through time-clock and card-catalogue methods, might
be lost ten times over through the shackling of the initiative of a
single man of unrecognized genius. And all this would be very much
to the purpose; but it is not upon any such special pleading that
the case ought to be made to rest. The loss that would be suffered
transcends all these concrete and definable instances of it. It
would be pervasive, fundamental, immeasurable. Grievous as might be
the injury caused by the prevention of specific achievements of
exceptional importance, this would be as nothing in comparison with
the intellectual [pg 65]and spiritual loss entailed by the lowering
of the human level, the devitalizing of the intellectual
atmosphere, which must inevitably follow upon the application of
factory methods to university life.

The case of the eugenics propaganda is far more complex. In its
origin, and doubtless in some of its present manifestations, it may
lay claim to being directed toward aims which are particularly
concerned with the higher interests of life. The author of
“Hereditary Genius” certainly could not be accused of
indifference to the part played in the past, or to be played in the
future, by exceptional minds and characters; nor is it necessary to
charge any of the present promoters of the propaganda with explicit
failure to appreciate the importance of such minds and characters.
The criticism is often made, from this standpoint, that the
hard-and-fast rules which the eugenists propose would, in point of
fact, have put under the ban some of the most illustrious names in
the annals of mankind—men whose genius was accompanied with
some of the very traits which they hold should most positively be
prevented from appearing. But, however weighty this objection to
the methods of eugenics may be, it is to be looked upon rather as
an item on the debit side of the reckoning than as marking an
ingrained defect, a fault at the very heart of the matter. The
eugenists may well challenge those who urge merely this kind of
objection to show that the losses thus pointed out are great enough
to offset the gains, in the very same direction, which they regard
their program as promising. Whatever the truth of the matter may
be, they can at least set up the contention that, as a mere affair
of quantity, genius will do better under their system than without
it.

What brings the eugenics movement into the Flatland category is
not its attitude toward the question of genius, or perhaps even of
singularity, but its attitude toward the life of mankind as a
whole—if indeed it can be said to have [pg 66]any attitude
toward the life of mankind as a whole. The profound elements of
that life seem not to come at all within the range of its
contemplation. Of course this does not apply to everything that
comes from the eugenics camp, nor to every person that calls
himself a eugenist. But on the other hand it is by no means only of
the crude projects of half-educated reformers, or the outgivings of
the prophets of our popular magazines, that it is true.
The agitation has derived much of its impetus, directly or
indirectly, from the teachings of men of high scientific eminence
who have attacked the question without any apparent realization of
its deeper bearings on the whole character of human life. This
influence often comes in the shape of exhortations, or suggestions,
addressed to the public at a time when attention is centered upon
some conspicuous crime or some particular phase of evil in the
community; sweeping and radical regulation of the right of
parenthood being urged as necessary for the prevention of all such
distressing phenomena. Thus, after the attempted assassination of
Mayor Gaynor, there was much talk of a “national campaign for
mental hygiene,” which should have the effect of
“preventing Czolgoszes and Schranks.” Its program was
thus indicated by one of the foremost professors of medicine in the
United States:

What the carrying out of such a programme would mean to mankind
at large, how profoundly it would modify those ideas about life,
those standards of human dignity and human rights, which are so
fundamental and so pervasive that they are taken for granted
without express thought in every act and every feeling of all
normal men and women—this does not seem ever to trouble the
mind of the devotee of universal regulation. He sees the
possibility [pg 67]of effecting a certain definite and
measurable improvement; that the means by which this is
accomplished must fatally impair those elemental conceptions of
human life whose value transcends all measurement, he has not the
insight or the imagination to recognize. The distinctions of social
class, of wealth, of public honor, leave untouched the equality of
men in the fundamentals of human dignity. They do not go to the
vitals of self-respect; they do not interfere with a man’s
sense of what is due to him, and what is due from him, in the
primary relations of life. If nature has been unkind to him in his
physical or mental endowments, he does not therefore feel in the
least disqualified, as regards his family, his friends, his
neighbors, the stranger with whom he chances to come into contact,
from receiving the same kind of consideration, in the essentials of
human intercourse, that is accorded to those who are more
fortunate; nor does he feel in any respect absolved from the duty
of playing the full part of a man. Under the régime of
medical classification—and the “mental hygiene”
programme can mean nothing less than that—all this would
disappear. Some men would be men, others would be something less.
It is true that, so far as regards the imbecile, the insane, and
the criminal, such a state of things obtains as it is; but this
stands wholly apart from the general life of the race, and has no
influence whatever on the habitual feelings and experiences of
human beings. The normal life of mankind is shot through and
through with the idea that a man’s a man; all that is highest
in feeling and conduct is closely bound up with it. Lessen its sway
over our feelings and thoughts and instincts, and how much benefit
in the shape of “preventing Czolgoszes and Schranks”
would be required to compensate for the loss in nobleness, in
depth, which human life would suffer?

The prohibition movement belongs, in the main, to a wholly
different order of things. The fight against the [pg 68]evils of
drink, as it has been carried on for a century or more, has been
animated by a moral fervor which classes it rather with the fight
against slavery, or with the great revivals of religion, than with
those movements which owe their origin to a calculating and
cold-blooded perfectionism. Its leaders have been fired with the
ardor of a war directed against a devastating monster, to whose
ravages was to be ascribed a large part of the misery and
wickedness that afflict mankind. It is true that the economic and
physiological aspects of the drink question were not ignored; the
total-abstinence men were glad enough to have this second string to
their bow. But the real fight was not against alcohol as one of
many things concerning which the habits of men are more or less
unwise; it was a fight against the Demon Rum, the ally of all the
powers of darkness. The plea of the moderate drinker was rejected
with scorn, not because there was any objection to moderate
drinking in itself, but because total abstinence was the only true
preventive of drunkenness, and drunkenness must be stamped out if
mankind was to be saved. The moderate drinker was censured not
because he was wasting his money, or failing to “conserve his
efficiency,” but because for the sake of a trivial
self-indulgence he was giving countenance to a practice which was
consigning millions of his fellow men to wretchedness in this world
and to everlasting damnation in the next.

Now this remarkable thing about the present extraordinary
manifestation of growth and strength in the prohibition movement is
that it is not in the least due to a strengthening of this
sentiment. On the contrary, it is safe to say that feeling about
drunkenness, about the drink evil in the sense in which it was
understood a generation ago, is far less intense than it was then.
The prohibition movement in its present stage is not the old
prohibition movement advancing to triumph through the onward march
of its proselyting zeal; of true prohibitionist zealots the number
is probably less, in proportion to the [pg 69]population, than
it was forty years ago. Its great accession of strength has come
from the growth of that order of ideas which is common to all the
“efficiency” movements of the time. And that growth
helps it in two ways. On the one hand, to the little army of
crusaders against the Demon Rum there has come the accession of a
host of men who are not thinking about demons at all, but who
calmly hold that the world would be better off without drinking,
and that this is an all-sufficient reason for prohibiting it. And
on the other hand, millions of persons who, in former days would
have cried out against this way of improving the
world—against the impairment of personal liberty and the
sacrifice of social enjoyment and social variety—have no
longer the courage of their convictions. The temper of the time is
unfavorable to the assertion of the value of things so incapable of
numerical measurement. Against the heavy battalions led by the
statisticians, and the experimental psychologists, and the
efficiency experts, what chance is there for successful resistance?
On the opposing side can be rallied only such mere irregulars as
are willing to fight for airy nothings—for the zest and
colorfulness of life, for sociability and good fellowship, for
preserving to each man access to those resources of relaxation and
refreshment which, without injury to others, he finds conducive to
his own happiness.

It is hardly necessary to say that, in taking up these various
movements, no attempt has been made at anything like comprehensive
discussion of their merits. Whatever may be the balance between
good and ill in any of them, they all have in common one tendency
that bodes danger to the highest and most permanent interests of
mankind; and it is with this alone that I am concerned. What that
tendency is has, I trust, been made sufficiently clear; but it will
perhaps be brought out more distinctly by a consideration of the
“Life Extension” [pg 70]propaganda more
detailed and specific than that given to the other three.

Conspicuous in the literature of this propaganda is the appeal
to standard modern practice in regard to machinery. “Those to
whom the care of delicate mechanical apparatus is entrusted,”
says the New York Commissioner of Health, “do not wait until
a breakdown occurs, but inspect and examine the apparatus minutely,
at regular intervals, and thus detect the first signs of
damage.” “This principle of periodic inspection,”
says the prospectus of the Life Extension Institute, “has for
many years been applied to almost every kind of machinery, except
the most marvelous and complex of all,—the human body.”
To find fault with the drawing of this comparison, with the
utilization of this analogy, would be foolish. That many persons
would be greatly benefited by submitting to these inspections is
certain; it is not impossible that they are desirable for most
persons. And the analogy of the inspection of machinery serves
excellently the purpose of suggesting such desirability. What is
objectionable about its use by the Life Extension propagandists is
their evident complacent satisfaction with the analogy as complete
and conclusive. Yet nothing is more certain than that, even from
the strictly medical standpoint, it ignores an essential
distinction between the case of the man and the case of the
machine. The machine is affected only by the measures that may be
taken in consequence of the knowledge arising from the inspection;
the man is affected by that knowledge itself. Whether the possible
physical harm that may come to a man from having his mind disturbed
by solicitude about his health is important or unimportant in
comparison with the good that is likely to be done him by the
following of the precautions or remedies prescribed, is a question
of fact to which the answer varies in every individual case. It may
be that in the great majority of cases the harm is insignificant in
comparison with the good. However that may [pg 71]be, the question
is there, and it is of itself fatal to the conclusiveness of the
argumentum ex machina. That this is not a captious
criticism, that it is based on substantial facts of life, ordinary
experience sufficiently attests; but it may not be amiss to point
to a conspicuous contemporary phenomenon which throws an
interesting light on the matter. The Christian Scientists regard
the ignoring of disease as the primary requisite for
health and longevity. That the Christian Science doctrine is a
sheer absurdity, no one can hold more emphatically than the present
writer; but it cannot be denied that in thousands of cases its
acceptance has been of physical benefit through its subjective
effect upon the believer. Personally, I would not purchase any
benefit to my physical life at such sacrifice of my intellectual
integrity; I mention the point only by way of accentuating the
undisputed fact that the presence or absence of concern about
health may have a potent influence on one’s bodily
welfare.

Although it is a still further digression from the main purpose
of this paper, I must permit myself a few words on another point
relating to the strictly medical claims of the plan of
“universal periodic medical examination.” It is natural
that its advocates say nothing about the danger of errors in
diagnosis; everybody knows that this danger exists, but sensible
men do not allow it to deter them from consulting a physician; in
this, as in other affairs of life, they do not cry for the moon,
but do the best they can. But it seems to be wholly overlooked by
the advocates of the propaganda of “universal periodic
examination” that the extent of this danger under present
conditions affords no indication at all of what it would be under
the system they contemplate. Its cardinal virtue, they constantly
proclaim, would be the detection of the very slightest indication
of impairment: “The task before us is to discover the first
sign of departure from the normal physiological path, and promptly
and effectually to apply the brake.” The consequence must
necessarily be that for [pg 72]one case of false
alarm that occurs today there will be a score, or a hundred, under
the new régime. For, in the first place, the individuals
seeking advice will not be, as they now are in the main, selected
cases in which there is some antecedent presumption that there is
something wrong; and secondly, the examiner, bent upon the one
great object of overlooking nothing, however slight, will give
warnings which, whether technically justifiable or not, will in
great numbers of cases have a wholly unjustifiable significance to
the mind of the subject. Who shall say how many persons will thus
be made to carry through life a burden of solicitude about their
health from which, if left to their own devices, they would have
been wholly free?

But it is not my design to find fault with this scheme as a
matter of medical benefit; if I have ventured to point out some
drawbacks, it is only by way of showing that, even from the
strictly medical standpoint the cult of uniformity, of
standardization, of mechanical perfection, is not free from fault.
But the great objection against that attitude of mind which is
typified in the appeal to the analogy of machinery is far more
vital. Our only interest in a machine is that we shall get out of
it as much, and as exact, work as possible. Our interest in our
bodies is not so limited. We may deliberately choose to forego the
maximum of mechanical perfection for the sake of living our lives
in a way more satisfactory to us than a constant care for that
perfection would permit. Even the most ardent of health
enthusiasts—unless he be an insane fanatic—draws the
line somewhere. What he forgets is that other people prefer to draw
the line somewhere else. They choose to run a certain amount of
risk rather than have their health on their minds. To
compel—whether by legal means or by social
pressure—every man to take precautions concerning his own
body which he deliberately prefers not to take; to make impossible,
in this most intimate and personal of all human [pg 73]concerns, the
various ways of acting which the infinite varieties of temperament
and desire may dictate—this would be such an invasion of
personal liberty, such a suppression of individuality, as would
strike us all as appalling, had we not grown so habituated to the
mechanical, the statistical, measurement of human values—to
the Flatland view of life.

What gives to these movements that I have been discussing the
character which I have been ascribing to them is not so much the
specific things which they severally aim to accomplish, but the
spirit in which they are carried on, and perhaps still more the
spirit, or want of spirit, with which they are met. It is not that
a balance is falsely struck between the benefit of the concrete,
circumscribed, measurable improvement aimed at and the injury done
to some deeper, more pervading, and quite immeasurable element or
principle of life; it is that the balance is not struck at all. The
subtler, the less tangible, element is simply ignored. It was not
always so. It was not so in the last generation, or the generation
before that. The phenomenon is one that is closely bound up with
the ruling tendency of thought and action in all directions; it is
not an accident of this or that particular agitation. Perhaps in no
direction is it more convincingly manifested than in the prevailing
tone of opinion, or at least of publicly expressed opinion, in
regard to the objects and ideals of universities. That in the
present state of the world’s economic and social development
on the one hand, and of the various sciences on the other,
“service”—that is, service directly conducive to
the general good—should be regarded as one of the great
objects of universities, is altogether right; that it should be
spoken of as their only object, which is the ruling
fashion, is most deplorable. The object of a university, said Mill,
is to keep philosophy alive; yet it would go hard with the present
generation to point to any one more truly and [pg 74]profoundly devoted
to the service, the uplifting, of the masses of mankind than was
John Stuart Mill. Were he living he would recognize, as thoroughly
as the best efficiency man of them all, that the universities of
today have opportunities and duties which were undreamed of half a
century ago. But he would know, too, that in those activities which
are directed to the promotion of practical efficiency, the
university is but one of many agencies, and that if it were not
doing the work some other means would be found for supplying the
demand. Its paramount value he would find now, as he did then, in
the service it renders not to the ordinary needs of the community
but to the higher intellectual interests and strivings of mankind.
That so few of us have the courage clearly to assert a position
even distantly approaching this—such a position as was mere
matter of course among university men in the last
generation—is perhaps the most significant of all the
indications of our drift toward Flatland.

[pg
75]

The Disfranchisement of
Property

Return to Table of
Contents

I

It is Hawthorne, I think, who tells us that when he was a boy he
used once in a while to go down to the wharves in Salem, and lay
his hand on the rail of some great East India merchantman, redolent
of spices, and thus bring himself in actual touch with the
mysterious orient. But there is nothing strange in this: almost
anything that we can feel or see may start the flight of fancy, and
open to us prophetic visions. This is even true of such dry symbols
as figures, for our journalists would never publish statistics as
they do, unless they knew that their readers liked to see them.
Travellers from other parts of the world have often laughed at our
fondness for revelling in the marvellous accounts of our material
dimensions, but they should remember that people who do not have a
taste for poetry may yet have a taste for romance, and that big
figures do appeal to the imagination.

It is true that there may be something portentous in bigness.
“Tom” Reed, as he was affectionately called, said many
wise things in a jesting way. At a certain crisis in our history he
exclaimed: “I don’t want Cuba and Hawaii; I’ve
got more country now than I can love.” A foreigner might
suppose that our politicians had similarly become terror-stricken
at the extent of our wealth and the rate at which it was growing.
They may well give the impression that there has been created in
the “money power,” a Frankenstein monster, the control
of whose murderous propensities has put them at their wit’s
end.

Figures are notorious liars; they may arouse emotion if looked
at in any light, but they must be looked at in [pg 76]many lights
if we would get an emotional effect that is truly worth while. Some
very large figures relating to Savings Banks have lately been
published. The deposits in these banks amount to over four and
two-thirds billions of dollars, and the number of separate accounts
is about ten and two-thirds millions. Savings deposits in all banks
are about $7,000,000,000, the number of accounts being 17,600,000.
Probably the interest paid on the savings banks deposits is 160
millions of dollars a year. I confess that these figures give me
much pleasure. I like to think that so many men have taken pains to
guard their wives and children against miserable want; that so many
women have to some extent made sure of their independence. It would
not be surprising to find that twelve millions of families,
possibly half the people of the country, were in this way protected
against extreme penury. Viewed in this light, the growth of wealth
does not seem so terrible. One might paraphrase Burke and say that
such wealth as this loses half its evil through losing all its
grossness. Indeed one might go further and say that if there were
twice as much of this wealth, and every person in the country had
an interest in it, it would lose all of its evil.

To young people, this is all dry enough. They like to think of
spending money, not of saving it. But it is not at all dry to their
elders. It is what St. Beuve said of literary enjoyment, a
“pure délice du goût et du coeur dans la
maturité.” It is a “Pleasure of the
Imagination” that can be appreciated only by those like the
old Scottish lawyer, who justified his penurious prudence by saying
that he had shaken hands with poverty up to the elbow when he was
young, and had no intention to renew the acquaintance. We have not,
at least in the Northern part of our country, had the terrible
experiences of the people of Europe, who are even now hiding their
money in a vague apprehension of danger, inherited from centuries
of rapine; but there are few of those who have given hostages to
fortune who have not had many hours, and [pg 77]even years, of
distressing anxiety concerning the future of their families. The
greater the provision made against this heart-corroding care by a
people, the happier should that people be.

It seems so unselfish a luxury to revel in these comfortable
statistics, that one is tempted to broaden his vision, and take in
the four or five billions of assets heaped up by the six or seven
millions of people who have insured their lives, and the one
hundred and fifty or two hundred millions of dollars paid out
yearly to lighten the distress attending the death of husbands and
fathers of families,—to say nothing of a much greater sum
repaid policy-holders. In many cases, happily, death causes no
actual want; but against these cases we may offset the stupendous
number of policies insuring against industrial accidents, possibly
twenty-five millions of them, representing one quarter of the
people of the country—for we may be sure that there are few
payments made under these policies that do not actually alleviate
suffering. We have here a colossal aggregate of altruism on the
part of the policy-holders, an intangible national asset grander
than all the material wealth which it represents; for the sordid
element in all these savings is necessarily small. There is a point
in the old story of the gambler on the Mississippi steamboat who
listened attentively to the persuasive arguments of a
life-insurance agent; he “allowed” that he was willing
to bet on almost any kind of game, but declined to take a hand in
one where he had to die to win. It is painful to think of the
infinity of petty economies, of all the grievous deprivations, the
positive hardships, undergone in so many millions of families, day
by day, and year by year, to secure these policies of insurance;
but, as Plato said, “the good is difficult.” There is
no heroism where there is no self-sacrifice. Whoever is disquieted
by the growth of “materialism” may be relieved by
reflecting that when so many millions of people are denying
themselves present enjoyments in order that [pg 78]others may be
spared pain in the future, there is such a leaven of high motive
among us as may leaven the whole lump.

It would be easy to keep on in this exalted strain, but perhaps
it is a little too much in the style of a life-insurance
advertisement. We may correct any such impression, by changing our
point of view. When we consider the difficulties and the hindrances
in the way of laying up these savings, while the moral effect of
the self-sacrifice hitherto involved is enhanced, the question
comes up whether this altruistic exertion can be maintained in the
future. How many of the ten millions of depositors in the savings
banks have considered that their rulers at Washington give away
every year in military pensions a sum equal to all, and more than
all, the income earned by the four billions of dollars in the
banks? When after many years, it seemed that this burden might at
last begin to be lightened, it was suddenly increased by the last
Congress perhaps thirty millions a year. Why should so many people
scrimp, year in and year out, when the equivalent of all the toil
and all the self-denial is thus swept away?

Senator Aldrich has told the country that its affairs could be
carried on for three hundred millions of dollars a year less than
it now pays. He is a very competent witness, and no one has
contradicted him. If the attempt had been made, he could perhaps
have shown—he could certainly show now—that three
hundred millions was an understatement. But this sum is nearly
equal to the income earned by the investments of all the savings
banks and all the life-insurance companies of the country. If our
rulers had borrowed ten billions of dollars at three per cent. and
had wasted it all, the country would be financially about where it
is now. They have not borrowed this ten billions of dollars, but if
Mr. Aldrich is right, they are spending the interest on it. They
have in effect mortgaged the wealth of the people to the extent
[pg
79]of all their deposits in the savings banks, and all their
investments in life-insurance companies, and are wasting the income
of these funds faster than it is earned. If anyone thinks this is
stating the case too strongly, he may add the waste of our state
and municipal rulers to that of those at Washington, and Mr.
Aldrich’s figure will seem moderate enough.

People who are comfortably off will reply to all this that we
are getting on pretty well, and seem to be on the whole doing
better from year to year. There is a well known passage in
Macaulay’s History which may be thought to give support to
optimism of this kind. “No ordinary misfortune,” he
said, “no ordinary misgovernment, will do so much to make a
nation wretched as the constant progress of physical knowledge, and
the constant effort of every man to better his condition will do to
make a nation prosperous.”

No one will deny that the history of England justifies this
statement; but let us remember the reason that Macaulay gave for
this insuperable prosperity. “Every man has felt entire
confidence that the State would protect him in the possession of
what had been earned by his diligence and hoarded by his
self-denial.”

It is impossible to maintain that every man now feels this
entire confidence. The income “earned by his diligence”
is henceforth to be taxed at a progressive rate, and the demagogues
are already complaining that the rate is not high enough. The
inheritance of his family, “hoarded by his
self-denial,” protected by the State until within a few
years, now pays taxes which amount to the interest on a billion of
dollars. We are assured by a railroad officer that three measures
of legislation have increased the expenses of his corporation alone
by a sum equal to the interest on $32,000,000, with no appreciable
benefit to the public. The number of such laws is incalculable, and
the cost of complying with them has become [pg 80]an almost
intolerable burden. The income of the railroads declines, while
their taxes increase, in some cases two or three fold. Lawyers and
office holders thrive and are cheerful; investors suffer and
tremble.

The people of New York seem just now to be in a way to find out
how the enormous taxes which their rulers have levied on them are
expended; but New York has no monopoly of corrupt rulers, and the
cost of investigating extravagance is itself extravagant. And yet
people wonder at the increased cost of living! Unfortunately the
oppressions of government do worse than discourage business
enterprise; they tend to demoralize society. There are too many men
who hesitate to marry because they do not have confidence in the
future, too many married people who do not dare to have more than
one or two children, if they dare to have any, to make it possible
to maintain that there is now no dread of more than ordinary
misgovernment.

It is difficult to ascertain the total wealth of the country.
The census bureau is notoriously dilatory. Its latest estimate was
for 1904, when this aggregate was computed to be $107,000,000,000,
or about $1,300 per caput. Assuming this ratio, the wealth
of our people should now be over $120,000,000,000; but the figures
are largely conjectural. It happens, however, that we possess some
figures that are altogether trustworthy. In the year 1909 the
Federal Government imposed a tax of one per cent. on the net income
of every corporation, joint stock company, or association,
including insurance companies, organized for profit, whenever this
net income is over $5,000. There are some other exemptions, but
they are not sufficient to demand consideration, and may be
disregarded. Now we may be absolutely certain of one thing, and
that is that the net income of those concerns will not be
overestimated. Their net income may be more than what they report
for the purposes of taxation, [pg 81]but it surely
cannot be less. For the past year it seems probable that this tax
will produce nearly thirty-five millions of dollars net income,
after deducting all expenses, losses, depreciation, interest on
debts and on deposits paid by banks, and dividends from other
companies subject to the tax.

It may be more, but it cannot be less. Here our certainty ends.
Guesses will vary, but in view of what we know in a general way of
the conditions of business during the past year, we may perhaps
venture to assume that the net income of these concerns is six per
cent. of their real wealth. If this assumption is correct, their
total wealth is 60 billions of dollars, or one half of the total
wealth of the nation.

This estimate may be confirmed to some extent by other
statistics. Calling the physical value of the railroads fourteen
billions, their net earnings at five per cent. would be 700
millions, which corresponds well enough with the figures of the
government, although some railroad men would make their net
earnings much less. We do not know the net income of the untaxed
corporations. Their returns would show its amount, but the
government does not supply the information. As there must be now
nearly 250,000 such corporations, if their average income is only
$2,000 a year, the total could be $500,000,000. If it is $4,000,
their income would be almost a billion dollars. On a 5 per cent.
basis, the wealth of these corporations would be nearly 20 billion
dollars. It seems, on the whole, that the wealth held by
corporations is probably more than half our total wealth rather
than less.

The bearing of these figures on our subject is now apparent. All
of this property is disfranchised. It is, economically, to a very
great extent disfranchised; politically, it is altogether
disfranchised. What I mean by this is that the owners of this
wealth, as owners, have very little to say, and nothing to do,
about its care and management. Probably [pg 82]more than half of
our people are directly or indirectly interested in it as owners.
They have been attracted by a desire to share, however humbly, in
big and famous enterprises, by the freedom from liability of the
portion of their estates outside the particular investments, and by
the freedom at death or withdrawal of associates from appraisals
and accountings and probable closing of the business, as is the
inevitable practice in mere partnerships. Two centuries ago people
who saved money could hardly find ways to invest it. The practice
of incorporation has enormously increased our wealth by putting a
stop to hoarding without interest, stimulating saving, and
broadening industry. The number of individual owners of the bonds
and stocks of corporations is incalculable, and their holdings
added to those of savings banks, insurance companies, trust
companies and other fiduciary institutions, churches, hospitals,
and colleges, make up a total of almost fabulous extent. It is true
that large sums are loaned to persons, and on mortgages of real
estate; but for most people such investments are not desirable or
convenient, and they are altogether inadequate to absorb the vast
sums that are available. In fact probably most investments of this
character are now made by corporations who gather the savings of
little depositors and premium payers; and it would cost much more
to make them in any other way.

Corporations, therefore, are necessary, but they necessarily
separate the ownership of wealth from its management. To invest is
generally to entrust your money to another, and those who invest in
corporations, unless they control them, are economically
disfranchised, because the stockholders in all large corporations
almost never influence the management of their property, and as a
rule do not know anything about it. They don’t because they
can’t. A few years ago a very large number of people were
much worried by the exposure of some [pg 83]scandalous doings
by the managers of certain great life-insurance companies. They
would have been very glad to combine and choose better managers if
they could; but they couldn’t. Laws were passed for the
purpose of enabling the policy-holders to select their trustees,
but the only result has been a ridiculous and rather expensive
fiasco. As in politics, the rank and file select the managers
selected for them by a few men who understand the situation. When
many thousands of people own stock in a concern, they live all over
this continent and in foreign parts, and it is a physical
impossibility to bring them together. They do not know one another,
and very few of them know much about the affairs of the concern,
and if they know anything of the candidates that may be suggested,
it is generally only by hearsay.

How many of the eighty-eight thousand stockholders in the
Pennsylvania Railroad, for instance, have ever attended a meeting?
For that matter, how many of them have ever studied the report of
the railroad? Not one in ten could spare the time to read it,
perhaps not one in a hundred could master it. The report may be
read in a few hours; it would take as many months, if not years to
verify it. Very nearly half these stockholders are women; the
average holding is 120 shares, (par $50), and one-sixth of the
stockholders own less than 10 shares each. Ten thousand of them are
abroad. Much stock is held by trustees, whose beneficiaries are
probably very numerous, and totally incompetent to understand
railroad management. There are also more than twenty thousand
holders of stock in subsidiary corporations controlled by the
Pennsylvania Railroad. No one can tell the number of bondholders;
perhaps there are as many as there are employees, making an
aggregate of almost half a million.

Sometimes trustees abuse their office; but on the whole they
have done pretty well, and whether they have or not, [pg
84]there is no other way in which large capitals can be
managed. All civilization rests on confidence. Such a vast fabric
could not be built on confidence unless confidence was deserved. As
a matter of fact, a man invests his money just as he invests in a
surgeon. He does not think of directing the surgeon how to operate.
If the operation does not succeed, he tries another surgeon next
time—if there is a next time.

Of course all this applies chiefly to the large corporations.
There are many thousands of small ones, having few stockholders,
who reside where the business is established. These stockholders
know more or less of the details of the business; they can judge to
some extent how it is carried on, they are often acquainted with
the managers, or are the managers themselves, and if not, they are
able sometimes to combine and change the management. And I will
anticipate a little and say here that the property of such a
corporation located in a small town is often to some extent not
politically disfranchised, because the people of the town
understand that they are directly interested in the prosperity of
the business. But it seems almost impossible for the stockholders
to change the management of a large corporation. It has been done a
few times. Mr. Harriman notoriously did it by using the money of
one concern to buy the stock of another, and that is almost the
only way in which it has been done. No doubt there has been an
immense deal of combination which has resulted in change of
management, but this has not been because the stockholders combined
to oust their trustees, but because they thought they saw a good
chance to sell their stock to those who would pay high for the
control, or to participate in these combinations. There have been a
good many cases where an enterprising speculator has managed to get
hold of a majority of the stock and change the control, and
powerful bankers can sometimes get proxies enough to put a stop to
bad management; but spontaneous movements of this kind [pg 85]on
the part of the mass of the stockholders are extremely rare.

Beyond dispute then, the great mass of wealth held by
corporations is almost wholly under the control of their managers,
and not the mass of the owners. Mr. Hill has recently testified
that he never knew a stockholder to attend a meeting except to make
trouble; by which he perhaps meant that when a single stockholder
appeared, it was to get paid for not making trouble.

It need hardly be said that no such thing as legitimate
representation of corporate wealth is known in our politics, and
the representation of individual wealth is very limited. The theory
of government by manhood suffrage, so far as there is any theory,
is now entirely personal. In early times the freemen of the town,
or little commune, met and legislated according to their needs. To
be a freeman one had to own property; to “have a stake in the
country.” Nowadays nearly all the men who have no property
can vote, and some that have property cannot. In England, they are
doing away with “plural voters.” Heretofore it was
thought just, when a man owned land in more than one place, that he
should have his say in the government of all; but this is now
forbidden. The right was never recognized in this country, partly
because formerly men seldom owned property in two places, but as
transportation improved the conditions changed. The
“commuters” are legion. Their business and their
capital are under one jurisdiction and their dwellings and families
under another; but they can vote in only one. Many thousands of men
own houses in both city and country. They could help in the
government of both, but are disfranchised in one or the other.
Under our complicated systems of registration, they are often
disfranchised at both.

Of course when population increases, the town meeting becomes a
physical impossibility. There is no more direct [pg 86]legislation;
it has to be delegated. The power is transferred to the city
councils, and to the state and national legislatures. In other
words, the interests of the owners of wealth are put in charge of
trustees. According to Hamilton, the theory of our government is
that the people will “naturally” choose the wisest of
their number to represent them. There is not much basis for this
assumption. Rousseau scouted it. According to him, the
volonté générale could be ascertained
only in the town meeting, and he seriously maintained that the
ideal government for the Roman empire was by the gangs of rioters
that the politicians marshalled in the Forum at Rome under the name
of comitia. All that the theory of our government
requires, is that our rulers shall be such men as are designated by
the majority of the voters. That they should be wise and good men
may accord with the theory of aristocracy; it is no part of the
theory of democracy, and is certainly a very small part of the
practice.

When I say that half of the property of this country is
disfranchised, I mean that the nature of this property is such that
it is peculiarly subject to the power of rulers, and that the
owners of it have hardly any legitimate way of defending it against
the arbitrary exercise of this power. The corporation is created by
the legislature; men cannot combine their capitals and avoid
unlimited liability for the debts of the combination, unless the
law specifically authorizes the proceeding. Of course, if the
legislature has power to make such grants, it must have power to
alter them. In short, property held by a corporation is held at the
will of the legislature, and in a way and to an extent that
property held by an individual is not. It is not very easy for the
legislature to plunder or blackmail individuals, even when they are
disfranchised, because it has to be done by general laws, and
direct methods arouse direct opposition. But, as we have seen,
stockholders as a class cannot defend their rights, and as things
are now, their trustees cannot have much to say concerning [pg 87]the
laws that affect their property. Managers of large corporations are
now commonly denounced as unfit to be legislators, and are
practically excluded from the halls of legislation. In some states
they are even specifically disfranchised, so far as holding office
is concerned, and, under the new despotism, ironically dubbed the
new freedom, every man whose wealth and ability make his aid
important to many enterprises, is to be forbidden to participate in
more than one. Yet property is almost entirely subject to the
disposition of the legislature! not entirely, for the courts afford
some protection; but even this is now threatened: we may
“progress” so far as to make it unconstitutional for a
judge to declare any law unconstitutional.

It goes without saying that half the property of the country
will not submit to spoliation without a struggle. If it cannot have
representation legitimately, it will try to get it illegitimately
or extra legitimately. The managers of corporations have in the
past found many ways to influence legislation. Despite the
prejudices against them, some of them have had themselves chosen as
legislators; even as judges. Some have brought about the election
of legislators who would act in their favor, and have even bribed
legislators. Until recently it was not even unlawful for these
managers to use the money of their stockholders in political
contributions; some managers acted on the “Good Lord! Good
Devil!” principle. Probably most of the politicians paid no
railroad fares. Many of them got passes for their families and
their friends; and it was certainly to be expected that they should
listen to the requests of those who granted these favors. The
situation became grotesque when a great ruler, seeking a nomination
to office with the proclaimed purpose of enforcing the laws against
rebates and passes, required the railroad managers to furnish him
free transportation on his righteous mission.

There were obvious objections to these practices, and [pg
88]public opinion finally compelled our rulers to pass laws
prohibiting them. Theoretically the managers of corporations are
now effectually disfranchised. They dare not offer themselves as
candidates for office. They scarcely dare to favor, even secretly,
the choice of rulers who will listen to them. Fortunately, however,
they hardly longer dare to offer bribes. Anyone on friendly terms
with them is politically a suspicious character. Any lawyer who has
been employed by them becomes unavailable as a candidate for
office. Our legislators, as was to be expected, at once showed the
effect of release from restraint. It has been uncharitably said
that in revenge for the loss of their passes and other favors, they
attacked the railroads; but there has been considerable voting of
more mileage, and our congressmen at least voted themselves ample
indemnity in larger salaries, and they opened fire on corporations
in general and railroads in particular, with a broadside of
statutes. Against this fire the property of millions of small
holders in the corporations has been almost defenceless. Some of
these statutes are so drawn that the plain business man does not
know whether he is a criminal or not; if he could afford to consult
the best of lawyers it would not help him much. The only safe
course to pursue is to agree with the adversary quickly; to plead
guilty to whatever charge is made, and beg for mercy. That one is
innocent is immaterial. The expense of litigation is nothing to the
rulers of the United States; but it may be ruinous to their
subjects. The cost of the commissions and investigations and
prosecutions of the last few years has been enormous. Only lawyers
can contemplate it without consternation.

True, the managers of large corporations can make their protests
heard. They can publish their pleas in the newspapers, and issue
pamphlets, and they can appear before committees and commissions,
and submit arguments. The managers of small corporations cannot
afford such measures. You might as well refer a servant-girl who
couldn’t [pg 89]collect her wages, to the Hague Tribunal, as
to send a plain business man to Washington to plead his cause.

The animus of these statutes is hostility to great corporations.
But it is impossible to legislate against great corporations
without hitting the small ones. Take the case of the recent
corporation income tax; the 244,000 corporations exempt from the
tax had to make out their inventories and keep their books and
report their proceedings precisely as if they were liable to the
tax. A fine of from $1,000 to $10,000 and a 50 per cent. increased
assessment were the penalties for failure. But the cost of
complying with all the requirements of the law, for a corporation
having an income of two or three thousand dollars, cannot be
figured at much less than the tax. Many corporations have no net
income. The managers of these concerns are not expert book-keepers,
and their returns must be in many cases so inaccurate as to expose
them to prosecution if the game were worth the candle. If we assume
that the average cost of making out the return is only ten dollars,
we have a bill of $2,400,000, which the stockholders, or the
employees, or the customers, must pay for the privilege of
demonstrating that the small corporations are not liable to pay
anything at all.

The corporation income tax law was really an act of popular
dislike of corporations exercising great monopolies. Grouping all
the little corporations with them was an absurdity and a
cruelty.

Corporations have no feelings. They are not wounded by the
hostility of legislatures. The managers of corporations of large
capital have feelings, and some of them are wounded in their pride
by this hostility. But they need not suffer in their pockets. They
are abundantly able to protect their own property; they know how to
make money on the short side of the market as well as the long
side. But the managers of the concerns of small capital are seldom
able to do this. Oppressive laws cause suffering to them, to the
mere holders of stock in all corporations, [pg 90]to the creditors
of all, to the employees, and to the customers. Many of these laws
profess to be meant to favor small people as against big
people—to restrain the rich corporations so that the poor
ones may have more liberty. There is no evidence to show that this
result is attained, or that the country would be better off if it
were attained. But there is plenty of evidence to show that half
the people of the country are suffering from these legislative
attacks on their property. The men who manage the great
corporations, whatever their faults, are men of enterprise and
courage. They are the true progressives; the prosperity that they
diffuse among the whole people is ordinarily more than can be
destroyed by our progressive politicians. They are now beginning to
feel that their rulers are discriminating against them as a class,
and are uneasy and disheartened, and reluctant to embark in new
enterprises; and the progress of the country is halted by their
apprehension. It is not the rich who suffer most: it is “the
unemployed,” and the millions of dumb, helpless, struggling
thrifty men and women whose hard earned savings constitute a large
part of the capital of the corporations; and who are already
alarmed at the shrinking value of these savings. It is, perhaps
most of all, the mass of ignorant unthrifty poor, whose chief
wealth is the wages paid them by the corporations which they are
taught to look on as their oppressors.

[pg
91]

Railway Junctions

Return to Table of
Contents

In his illuminating essay on The Lantern-Bearers,
Stevenson complains of the vacuity of that view of life which he
finds expressed in the pages of most realistic writers. “This
harping on life’s dulness and man’s meanness is a loud
profession of incompetence; it is one of two things: the cry of the
blind eye, I cannot see, or the complaint of the dumb
tongue, I cannot utter.” And then, with a fine
flourish, he declares:—“If I had no better hope than to
continue to revolve among the dreary and petty businesses, and to
be moved by the paltry hopes and fears with which they surround and
animate their heroes, I declare I would die now. But there has
never an hour of mine gone quite so dully yet; if it were spent
waiting at a railway junction, I would have some scattering
thoughts, I could count some grains of memory, compared to which
the whole of one of these romances seems but dross.”

“If it were spent waiting at a railway junction”
… Here, with his instinct for the perfect phrase, Stevenson
has pointed a finger at the one experience which is commonly
accepted as the acme of imaginable dulness. This man, who could be
happy at a railway junction, could not have found a prouder way of
boasting to posterity that he had never “faltered more or
less in his great task of happiness.”

It is because railway junctions are the most unpopular places in
the world that they have been singled out for praise in
The Unpopular Review. Poor places, lonely
and forlorn, cursed by so many, celebrated by so few,—surely
they have waited over-long for an apologist…. But first of
all, in order to be fair, we must consider the customary view of
these points of punctuation in the text of travel.

[pg
92]Far up in Vermont, at a point vaguely to the east of
Burlington, there is a place called Essex Junction. It consists of
a dismal shed of a station, a bewildering wilderness of tracks, and
an adjacent cemetery, thickly populated (according to a local
legend) with the bodies of people who have died of old age while
waiting for their trains. This elegiac locality was visited, many
years ago, by the Honorable E.J. Phelps, once ambassador of the
United States to the court of St. James’s. He was allotted
several hours for the contemplation of the cemetery; and his
consequent meditations moved him to the composition of a poem, in
four stanzas, which is a little classic of its kind. Space is
lacking for a quotation of more than the initial stanza; but the
taste of a poem, as of a pie, may conveniently be judged from a
quadrant of the whole.—

It was apparently the purpose of the writer to convey the
impression that his period of waiting had been passed without
pleasure; but yet we may easily confute him with another quotation
from The Lantern-Bearers. “One pleasure at
least,” says Stevenson, “he tasted to the
full—his work is there to prove it—the keen pleasure of
successful literary composition.” Was this honorable author
ever moved to such eloquence by an audience with Queen [pg
93]Victoria? Never; so far as we know. Was not Essex
Junction, therefore, a more inspiring spot than Buckingham Palace?
Undeniably. Then, why complain of Essex Junction?

For, indeed, the pleasure that we take from places is nothing
more nor less than the pleasure we put into them. A person
predisposed to boredom can be bored in the very nave of Amiens; and
a person predisposed to happiness can be happy even in Camden, New
Jersey. I know: for I have watched American tourists in Amiens; and
once, when I had gone to Camden, to visit Walt Whitman in his
granite tomb, I was wakened to a strange exhilaration, and wandered
all about that little dust-heap of a city amazing the inhabitants
with a happiness that required them to smile. “All
architecture,” said Whitman, “is what you do to it when
you look upon it;… all music is what awakes from you when
you are reminded by the instruments”: and I must have had
this passage singing in my blood when I enjoyed that monstrous
courthouse dome which stands up like a mushroom in the midst of
Camden.

I have never been to Essex Junction; but I should like to go
there—just to see (in Whitman’s words) what I could do
to it. Imagine it upon a windy night of winter, when a hundred
discommoded passengers are turned out, grumbling, underneath the
stars,—coughing invalids, and kicking infants, and indignant
citizens, scrambling haphazard among tottering trunks, and picking
their way from train to train. Imagine their faces, their voices,
their gesticulations: here, indeed, you will see more than a
theatre-full of characters. Or, if human beings do not interest
you, imagine the mysterious gleam of yellow windows veiled behind a
drift of intermingled smoke and steam. Listen, also, to the clang
of bells, the throb and puff of the engines, and the shrill shriek
of their whistles. Or peer into the station-shed, made stuffy by
the breath of many loiterers; and contrast their death in life with
[pg
94]the life in death of those others who loiter through
eternity beneath the gravestones of the cemetery. I can imagine
being happy with all this (and even writing a paragraph about it
afterwards): but, above all, I should like to gather those hundred
discommoded passengers upon the station-platform, and to rehearse
and lead them in a solemn chant of the refrain of Phelps’s
poem. Imagine a hundred voices singing lustily in unison,

under the vast cathedral vaulting of the night, until the
adjacent dead should seem to stand up in their graves and join the
anthem of anathema…. Who is there so bold to tell me that
enjoyment is impossible in such a place as this?

There is very little difference between places, after all: the
true difference is between the people who regard them. I should
rather read a description of Hoboken by Rudyard Kipling than a
description of Florence by some New England schoolmarm. To the
poet, all places are poetical; to the adventurous, all places are
teeming with adventure: and to experience a lack of joy in any
place is merely a sign of sluggish blood in the beholder.

So, at least, it seems to me; for not otherwise can I explain
the fact that, like my beloved R.L.S., I have always enjoyed
waiting at railway junctions. I love not merely the marching
phrases, but also the commas and the semi-colons of a
journey,—those mystic moments when “we look before and
after” and need not “pine for what is not.” I
have never done much waiting in America, which is in the main a
country of express trains, that hurl their lighted windows through
the night like what Mr. Kipling calls “a damned hotel;”
but there is scarcely a country of Europe except Russia whose
railway junctions [pg 95]are unknown to me. In many of these little
nameless places I have experienced memorable hours: and because the
less enthusiastic Baedeker has neglected to star and double-star
them, I have always wanted to praise them, in print somewhat larger
than his own. Space is lacking in the present article for a
complete guide to all the railway junctions of Europe; but I should
like to commemorate a few, in gratitude for what befell me
there.

There is a junction in Bavaria whose name I have forgotten; but
it is very near Rothenburg, the most picturesquely medieval of all
German cities. It consists merely of a station and two intersecting
tracks. When you enter the station, you observe what seems to be a
lunch-counter; but if you step up to it and innocently order food,
a buxom girl informs you that no food is ever served
there—and then everybody laughs. This pleasant cachinnation
attracts your attention to the assembled company. It consists of
many peasants, in their native costumes (which any painter would be
willing to journey many miles to see), who are enjoying the
delicious experience of travel. They are great travelers, these
peasants. Once a month they take the train to Rothenburg, and once
a month they journey home again, to talk of the experience for
thirty days. All of them have heard of Nuremberg [which is actually
less than a hundred miles away],—that vast and wonderful
metropolis, so far, so very far, beyond the ultimate horizon of
their lives. They would like to see it some day—as I should
like to see the Taj Mahal—but meanwhile they content
themselves with the great adventure of going to Rothenburg,—a
city that is really much more interesting, if they could only know.
In the very midst of these congregated travelers, I casually set
down a suit-case which was plastered over with many labels from
many lands; and this suit-case affected them as I might be affected
by a messenger from Mars. They spelled out many unfamiliar
languages, and a murmur of amazement swept through [pg 96]the entire
company when one of them discovered that that suit-case had been to
Morocco. Morocco, they assured me, was a place where black men rode
on camels; and I had no heart to tell them that it was a country
where white men rode on mules. Then another of these
travelers—an old man, with a face like one of Albrecht
Dürer’s drawings—discovered a label that read
“Venezia.” “Is that,” he said,
“Venedig?” with a little gasp. “Yes;
Venedig,” I responded, “where the streets are
water.” Slowly he removed his hat. “Ach,
Venedig!” he sighed; and then he stooped down, and, with the
uttermost solemnity, he kissed the label…. And then I
understood the vast impulsion of that wanderlust which has
pushed so many, many Germans southward, to overrun that golden city
that is wedded to the sea. I have forgotten the name of that
junction, as I said before; but I have never been so happy in
Munich as in this lonely station where there is no food.

Speaking of food reminds me of Bobadilla, in southern Spain.
Bobadilla sounds as if it ought to be the name of a medieval town,
with ghosts of gaunt imaginative knights riding forth to tilt with
windmills; but there is no town at all at Bobadilla,—merely
two railway restaurants set on either side of several intersecting
tracks. For some mysterious reason, passengers from the four
quarters of the compass—that is to say, from Cordoba,
Granada, Algeciras, or Sevilla—are required to alight here,
and eat, and change their trains. I remember Bobadilla as the place
where you spend your counterfeit money. Many of the current coins
of southern Spain are made of silver; and the rest are made of
lead. For leaden five-peseta pieces there is a local name,
“Sevillan dollars,” which ascribes their coinage to the
crafty artisans of the capital of Andalucia. These pieces, which
are plentiful, are just as good as silver dollars—when you
can persuade anyone to take them. The currency of any coinage,
except gold, depends entirely upon the faith of those who pass and
take [pg
97]it and has no reference to its intrinsic value; and, in
southern Spain, the leaden dollars serve as counters for just as
many commercial transactions as the dollars made of silver. The
only difference is that they are commonly accepted only after
protest. In every Spanish shop, a slab of marble is built into the
counter, and on this slab all proffered coins are slapped before
they are accepted by the merchant. The traveler soon learns to
fling his change upon the pavement; and many merry arguments ensue
regarding the timbre of their ring. I remember how once,
in the wondrous town of Ronda, when a beggar had imposed himself
upon me as a guide and led me into a church where High Mass was
being chanted, I gave him a peseta to get rid of him, and at once
he flung it upon the pavement of the church, and chased it,
listening, across the nave. Thereafter, he protested loudly that
the piece was lead, and disrupted the intoning of the priests.
“Very well,” said I, “it is, in any case, a gift;
if you don’t want it, I will take it back”: and he
accepted it with bows and smiles, and allowed the weary priests to
continue their intonings. But Bobadilla is the one place in
southern Spain where money is never jingled upon marble. There is
no time between trains to quibble over minor matters; and a
“Sevillan dollar” accepted from one passenger is
blithely handed to another who is traveling in the opposite
direction. I discovered this fact on the occasion of my first visit
to this interesting junction; and on subsequent occasions I have
eaten my fill at one or another of the railway restaurants and
settled the account with all the leaden money garnered up from
weeks of traveling. There is surely no dishonesty in observing the
custom of a country; and Bobadilla may be treasured by all
travelers as a clearing-house for counterfeit coins.

Again, in northern France, it was merely by some accident of
changing trains that I discovered the lovely little town of Dol. I
found myself in Saint Malo, for obvious reasons; and I desired to
go to Mont Saint-Michel, for [pg 98]reasons still more
obvious—Mother Poulard’s omelettes, and architecture,
and the incoming of the tide. Between them—the map told
me—was situated Dol. I made inquiries of the porter in the
Saint Malo hotel. He responded in English,—the English of
Ici on parle anglais. “Dol,” said he,
“is a dull place.” He pronounced “Dol” and
“dull” in precisely the same manner, and smiled at his
sickly pun. I did not like that smile; and I alighted at the town
that he despised. It was a little picture-book of a place, with
many toy-like medieval houses clustered side by side around a
market-place where peasants twisted the tails of cows. I strolled
to the cathedral—and found myself mysteriously in England. It
was a manly Norman edifice, sane and reticent and strong, set in a
veritable English green, with little houses round about, reminding
one of Salisbury. I entered the Cathedral; and found the nave to be
composed in what is called in England the “decorated”
style, and the choir to give hints of “perpendicular.”
And then I remembered, with a start, that the ancestors of all that
is most beautiful in England had migrated from Normandy, and that
here I was visiting them in their antecedent home. “Saxon and
Norman and Dane are we;” and all that was Norman in me
reached forth with groping hands to grasp the palms of those old
builders who reared this little sacrosanct cathedral in the far-off
times when one dominion extended to either side of the English
Channel.

It was by a similar accident—desiring to transfer myself
from Bourges to Auxerre—that I discovered the wonderful
junction-town of Nevers, which, despite the guide-books, is more
interesting than either of the others. It possesses a Gothic
cathedral with an apse at either end, that looks as if two churches
had collided and telescoped each other. There is also a Romanesque
church at Nevers which is just as simple and as manly as either of
the famous abbeys in Caen; and a chateau with rounded towers, which
once belonged to Mazarin. But the most amusing [pg 99]feature of
this town is that, though Bourges packs itself to bed at ten
o’clock, Nevers sits blithely up till twelve, listening to
music in cafés, and watching moving-pictures; and this
amiable incongruity in a medieval town makes you bless that
complication of the time-table which has forced you, against
forethought, to stay there over night.

It is difficult for me to remember a railway junction in which
there was nothing to do; but perhaps Pyrgos, in Greece, comes
nearest to this description. At this point, you change cars on your
way from Patras to Olympia. The town is made of mud: that is to
say, the single-storied houses are built of unbaked clay. There is
nothing to see in Pyrgos. But I amused myself by addressing the
inhabitants, in the English language, with an eloquent oration that
soon gathered them under my control; and thereafter I set a hundred
of them at the pleasant task of trying to push the train for
Olympia on its way to take me to the Hermes of Praxiteles. I knew
no word of their language, nor did they of mine; but they
understood that that train should be started, if human force were
sufficient to help the cars upon their way: and finally, when the
engine puffed and snorted with a tardily awakened sense of duty,
the train was cheered by the entire population as I waved my hand
from the rear platform and quoted one of Daniel Webster’s
perorations.

Is it—I have often wondered—so difficult as people
think, to be happy in an hour “spent waiting at a railway
junction”?… The kingdom of happiness is within us; or
else there is no truth in our assumption that the will of man is
free: and I am inclined to pity a man who, being happy in
Amalfi—the loveliest of all the places I have ever
seen—cannot also manage to be happy in Pyrgos—or in
Essex Junction—and to communicate his happiness to his
responsive fellow-travelers.

The true enjoyment of traveling is to enjoy traveling; not to
relish merely the places you are going to, but to [pg 100]relish also
the adventure of the going. The most difficult train-journey I
remember is the twenty-hour trip from Lisbon to Sevilla, with a
change of cars in the ghastly early morning at the border-town of
Badajoz and another change at noon at the sun-baked, parched, and
God-forsaken town of Merida; and yet I relish as red letters on my
personal map of Spain a pleasant quarrel over the price of
sandwiches at Badajoz and the way a muleteer of Merida flung a
colored cloak over his shoulder and posed for an unconscious moment
like a painting by Zuloaga.

And this philosophy has a deeper application to life at large:
for all life may be figured as a journey, and few there are who are
natively equipped for the enjoyment of all the waste and waiting
places on the way. The minds of most people are so fixed upon the
storied capitals that are featured in those works of fiction known
as guidebooks that they are impeded from enjoying the minor
stations on their journey. “Hurry me to Sevilla,” cries
the traveler—and misses the sight of my muleteer of Merida.
In America, our society is crammed with people who fail to enjoy
life on five thousand a year because their minds are fixed upon
that distant time when they hope to enjoy life on twenty thousand a
year. And if ever they attain that twenty thousand they will not
enjoy it either; but will merely peer forward to a hypothetical
enjoyment at fifty thousand a year. And this is the essence of
their tragedy:—they have not learned to wait with
happiness.

Is there any reason for this inordinate ambition to “get
on”? Louis Stevenson was happier, as a small boy with a
bull’s-eye lantern at his belt, than any king upon his
throne. The secret of enjoyment is to learn to look about us, to
value what our destiny has given us, to transform it into magic by
some contributory gift of poetry or humor, to consider with
contentment the lilies of the field. The zest of life is in the
living of it; and “to travel hopefully is a better thing than
to arrive.”

How often, in the roaring and tumultuary tide of life, [pg
101]we meet a man who sighs, “If only I could have a
single day in which there was nothing that I had to do, nothing
even that I had to think of, how happy I should be!” and yet
this self-same man, if set down at a railway junction, will at once
bestir himself to seek something to think of, something to do, and
will spurn the gift of leisure. The incessant hurry of our current
life has tragically lured us to forget the art of loitering. We are
no longer able—like Wordsworth, on his “old gray
stone”—to sit upon a trunk at some railway junction of
our lives and listen reverently to the “mighty sum of things
forever speaking.”

One of the loveliest women I have ever known—the late
Alison Cunningham—told me a little anecdote of the author of
The Lantern-Bearers which, so far as I know, has never yet
been published. When little Louis was about five years old, he did
something naughty, and Cummy stood him up in a corner and told him
he would have to stay there for ten minutes. Then she left the
room. At the end of the allotted period, she returned and said,
“Time’s up, Master Lou: you may come out now.”
But the little boy stood motionless in his penitential corner.
“That’s enough: time’s up,” repeated Cummy.
And then the child mystically raised his hand, and with a strange
light in his eyes, “Hush…,” he said,
“I’m telling myself a story….”

And, in the Christian Morals of Sir Thomas Browne, we
may read the following passage:—“He who must needs have
company, must needs have sometimes bad company. Be able to be
alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of
thyself; nor be only content, but delight to be alone and single
with Omnipresency. He who is thus prepared, the day is not uneasy
nor the night black unto him. Darkness may bound his eyes, not his
imagination. In his bed he may lie, like Pompey and his sons, in
all quarters of the earth; may speculate the universe, and enjoy
the whole world in the hermitage of himself.”

[pg
102]Wordsworth sitting quiescent and receptive in a lakeside
landscape, little Louis standing in a corner, Sir Thomas Browne
enjoying the whole world in the hermitage of himself:—what a
rebuke is offered by these images to those who fret and fume away
the leisure that is granted them at all the waiting places of their
lives!… These disgruntled travelers nel mezzo del cammin
di nostra vita miss their privilege and duty of enjoying life
merely because they miss the point that life is, in itself,
enjoyable. They are so busy reading guide-books to the vague beyond
that they shut their minds to all that may be going on about them,
or within them, at way-stations. They close their eyes and ears to
the immediate. They veto all perception of the here and now. But
life itself is always here and now; and, truly to enjoy it, we must
learn to look forever with unfaltering eyes into the bright face of
immediacy.

And there is another point about railway junctions that reveals
an important application to the larger journey of our life. A
friend of mine, who is a great lover of painting, had occasion once
(and only once) to change trains at Basle, in the course of a
journey from Lucerne to Heidelberg. He had to wait two hours at
this railway junction; and this time he pleasantly expended in
eating many dishes at a restaurant, and amusing the lax porters by
teaching them a method of economizing energy in shifting trunks. It
should be noted that this friend of mine was not trying to
“kill time;” for, like all genuine humanitarians, he of
course regards that tragic process as the least excusable of
murders. He was entirely happy for two hours in that railway
station. But—having packed his guide-book in a trunk—it
was not until he reached Darmstadt, some days later, that he
discovered that several of the very greatest works of Holbein are
now resident in Basle. The two hours that he had spent playing and
eating might have been devoted to an examination [pg 103]of many
masterpieces of that art which, more than any other, he had crossed
the seas to seek. He has never yet been able to return to Basle;
but for a sight of those lost portraits of the most honest and
straightforward of all German painters, he would gladly sell his
memories of both Lucerne and Heidelberg.

Here we have a record of a great disappointment that was
occasioned merely by the common habit of despising railway
junctions, and presuming them to be inevitably dull. But this same
unfortunate presumption, applied to life at large, leads many
people to overlook the nearness of some great adventure.
Interrogate a thousand men, and you will find that none of them has
first set eyes upon his greatest friend in the Mosque of Cordoba or
in Trafalgar Square. Every adventure of lasting consequence has
confronted all of them, without exception, in some hidden nook or
cranny of the world,—some place unknown to fame. Anybody is
as likely to meet the woman who is destined to become his wife, at
Essex Junction on a wintry night, as in the Parthenon by moonlight
in the month of May. The most romantic places in the world are
often those that promised, in advance, to be the least
romantic.

Since this is so, how can anybody ever dare to shut his eyes to
that incalculable imminency of adventure which environs him even
when he is merely changing trains on some island-platform of the
New York Subway? In our daily living we are never safe from
destiny; and who can ever know in what vacuous and sedentary period
of his experience he may suddenly be called upon to entertain an
angel unawares? It is best to be prepared for anything, at any hour
of our lives,—even at those moments that must, perforce, be
“spent waiting at a railway junction.”

[pg
104]

Minor Uses of the Middling
Rich

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Contents

To assert today that the rich are for the most part entirely
harmless is to dare much, for the contrary opinion is greatly in
favor. Such wholesale condemnation of the rich assumes a more
general and a more specific form. They are said to be harmful to
the body politic simply because they have more money than the
average: their property has been wrongly taken from persons who
have a better right to it, or is withheld from people who need it
more. But aside from being constructively a moral detriment from
the mere possession of wealth, the rich man may do specific harm
through indulging his vices, maintaining an inordinate display,
charging too much for his own services, crushing his weaker
competitor, corrupting the legislature and the judiciary, finally
by asserting flagrantly his right to what he erroneously deems to
be his own. Such are the general and specific charges of modern
anti-capitalism against wealth. Like many deep rooted convictions,
these rest less on analysis of particular instances than upon
axioms received without criticism. The word spoliation does yeoman
service in covering with one broad blanket of prejudice the most
diverse cases of wealth. But spoliation is assumed, not proved. My
own conviction that most wealth is quite blameless, whether under
the general or specific accusation, is based on no comprehensive
axiom, but simply on the knowledge of a number of particular
fortunes and of their owners. Such a road towards truth is highly
unromantic. The student of particular phenomena is unable to pose
as the champion of the race. But the method has the modest
advantage of resting not on a priori definitions, but on [pg
105]inductions from actual experience; hence of being
relatively scientific.

Before sketching the line of such an investigation, let me say
that in logic and common sense there is no presumption against the
wealthy person. Ever since civilization began and until yesterday
it has been assumed that wealth was simply ability legitimately
funded and transmitted. Even modern humanitarians, while dallying
with the equation wealth = spoliation, have been unwilling wholly
to relinquish the historic view of the case. I have always admired
the courage with which Mr. Howells faced the situation in one of
those charming essays for the Easy Chair of
Harper’s. Driving one night in a comfortable cab he
was suddenly confronted by the long drawn out misery of the
midnight bread line. For a moment the vision of these hungry fellow
men overcame him. He felt guilty on his cushions, and possibly
entertained some St. Martin-like project of dividing his
swallowtail with the nearest unfortunate. Then common sense in the
form of his companion came to his rescue. She remarked
“Perhaps we are right and they are wrong.” Why not? At
any rate Mr. Howells was not permitted to condemn in a moment of
compassion the career of thrift, industry and genius, that had led
him from a printer’s case to a premier position in American
letters, or, more concretely, he received a domestic dispensation
to cab it home in good conscience, though many were waiting in
chilly discomfort for their gift of yesterday’s bread. The
why so and why not of this incident are my real subject. For Mr.
Howells is merely a particularly conspicuous instance of the kind
of prosperity I have in mind. We are all too much dazzled by the
rare great fortunes. The newly rich have spectacular ways with
them. By dint of frequently passing us in notorious circumstances,
they give the impression of a throng. They are much in the papers,
their steam yachts loom large on the waters, they divorce quickly
and often, they buy the most egregious, old masters. [pg
106]By such more or less innocent ostentations, a handful
stretches into a procession, much as a dozen sprightly
supernumeraries will keep up an endless defile of Macduff’s
army on the tragic stage. Let us admit that some of the great
wealth is more or less foolishly and harmfully spent; my subject is
not bank accounts, but people; and very wealthy people constitute
an almost negligible minority of the race. Their influence too is
much less potent than is supposed. A slightly vulgarizing tendency
proceeds from them, but in waves of decreasing intensity. Their
vogue is chiefly a succès de scandale. Sensible
people will gape at the spectacle without admiration, and even the
reader of the society column in the sensational newspapers keeps
more critical detachment than he is usually credited with. In any
case neither the boisterous nor the shrinking multimillionaire has
any representative standing. He is not what a poor person means by
a rich person. Ask your laundress who is rich in your neighborhood,
and she will name all who live gently and do not have to worry
about next month’s bills. True pragmatist, she sees that to
be exempt from any threat of poverty is to all intents and purposes
to be rich. Her classification ignores certain niceties, but
corresponds roughly to the fact, and has the merit of corresponding
to government decree. Rich people, since the income tax, are
officially those who pay the tax but not the surtax. Families with
an income not less than four thousand dollars nor more than twenty
thousand comprise the harmless, middling rich. Let us once for all
admit that in the surtaxed classes there are many cases of quite
harmless wealth, while in the lower level of the rich, harmful
wealth will sometimes be found. Such exceptions do not invalidate
the general rule that all but a negligible fraction of the rich are
included in the first class of income taxpayers—on from four
to twenty thousand, that most of the property here held is
blamelessly held in good hands—wealth that in no fair
estimate can be regarded as harmful. In terms [pg 107]of British
currency, our category of the middling rich would include the
poorer individuals of the upper classes, the richer persons of the
lower middle class, and the upper middle class as a whole. This
comparison is made not to apply an alien class system which holds
very inadequately here in America, but simply to avow the
difficulty of my task of apology. The bourgeoisie is equally
suspect among radicals, reactionaries, and artists. My middling
rich are nothing other than what an European essayist would quite
brazenly call the haute bourgeoisie. It is quite a
comprehensive class, made up chiefly of professional men,
moderately successful merchants, manufacturers, and bankers with
their more highly paid employees, but including also many artists,
and teachers of all sorts. Incidentally it is an employing and
borrowing class in various degrees, hence especially subject to the
exactions of the labor union at one end, and of the great
capitalist and the Trust at the other.

The general harmlessness of the wealth of this class rests upon
the fact that it is in small part inherited, but mostly earned by
individual effort, while such effort has usually been honestly and
efficiently rendered and paid for at a moderate rate. In fact the
amount of capacity that can be hired for the slightest rewards is
simply amazing. It is the distinction of this class as compared
both with the wage earning and the capitalist class—both of
which agree in overvaluing their services and extorting payment on
their own terms—that it respects its work more than it
regards rewards. Consider the amount of general education and
special training that go to make a capable school superintendent,
or college professor; a good country doctor or clergyman—and
it will be felt that no money is more honestly earned. This is
equally true of many lawyers and magistrates, who are wise
counsellors for an entire country side. It is no less true of hosts
of small manufacturers who make a superior product with conscience.
For the wealth, small enough it usually is, [pg 108]that is thus
gained in positions of especial skill and confidence, absolutely no
apology need be made. I sometimes wish that the Socialists for whom
any degree of wealth means spoliation, would go a day’s round
with a country doctor, would take the pains to learn of the cases
he treats for half his fee, for a nominal sum, or for nothing;
would candidly reckon his normal fee against the long years of
college, medical school and hospital, and against the service
itself; would then deduct the actual expenses of the day, as
represented by apparatus, motor, or horse service—I can only
say that if such an investigator could in any way conceive that
physician as a spoliator, because he earned twice as much as a
master brick-layer or five times as much as a ditch
digger—if, I say, before the actual fact, our Socialist
investigator in any way grudges that day’s earnings, his
mental and emotional confusion is beyond ordinary remedy. And such
a physician’s earnings are merely typical of those of an
entire class of devoted professional men.

We do well to remind ourselves that the great body of wealth in
the country has been built up slowly and honestly by the most
laborious means, and accumulated and transmitted by
self-sacrificing thrift. A rich person in nine cases out of ten is
merely a capable, careful, saving person, often, too, a person who
conducts a difficult calling with a fine sense of personal honor
and a high standard of social obligation. We are too much dazzled
by the occasional apparition of the lawyer who has got rich by
steering guilty clients past the legal reefs, of the surgeon who
plays equally on the fears and the purses of his patients, of the
sensational clergyman who has made full coinage of his
charlatanism. All these types exist, and all are highly
exceptional. Most rich persons are self-respecting, have given
ample value received for their wealth, and have less reason to
apologize for it than most poor folks have to apologize for their
poverty.

Furthermore: for the maintenance of certain humdrum [pg
109]but necessary human virtues, we are dependent upon these
middling rich. It has been frequently remarked that a lord and a
working man are likely to agree, as against a bourgeois, in
generosity, spontaneous fellowship, and all that goes to make
sporting spirit. The right measure of these qualities makes for
charm and genuine fraternity; the excess of these qualities
produces an enormous amount of human waste among the wage earners
and the aristocrats impartially. The great body of self-controlled,
that is of reasonably socialized people, must be sought between
these two extremes. In short the building up of ideals of
discipline and of habits of efficiency and of good manners and of
human respect is very largely the task of the middle classes.
Whereas the breaking down of such ideals is, in the present posture
of society, the avowed or unavowed intention of a considerable
portion of laboring men and aristocrats. The scornful retort of the
Socialist is at hand: “Of course the middle classes are
shrewd enough to practice the virtues that pay.” Into this
familiar moral bog that there are as many kinds of morality as
there are economic conditions of mankind, I do not consent to
plunge. I need only say that the so-called middle class virtues
would pay a workman or a lord quite as well as they do a bourgeois.
Moreover, while workmen and lords are prone to scorn the
calculating virtues of the middle classes, there is no indication
that the bourgeoisie has selfishly tried to keep its
virtues to itself. On the contrary there is positive rejoicing in
the middle classes over a workman who deigns to keep a contract,
and an aristocrat who perceives the duty of paying a debt. In fine
we of the middle classes need no more be ashamed of our highly
unpicturesque virtues than we are of our inconspicuous wealth.

So far from being in danger of suppression, we middling rich
people are likely to last longer than the capitalists who exploit
us in practice, and the workmen who exploit us on principle.
Theoretically, and perhaps practically, [pg 110]the very rich
are in danger of expropriation. Theoretically the course of
invention may limit or almost abolish all but the higher grades of
labor. The need of the more skilful sort of service in the
professions, in manufacture, in agency of all sorts, is sure to
persist. The socialists expect to get such service for much less
than it at present brings, that is to make us poor and yet keep us
working. Such a scheme must break down, not through the refusal of
the middling rich to keep at work;—for I think there is
loyalty enough to the work itself to keep most necessary activities
going after a fashion, even under the most untoward
conditions;—but because to make us poor is to destroy the
conditions under which we can efficiently render a somewhat
exceptional service. Our wealth is not an extraneous thing that can
be readily added or taken away. It is our possibility of
self-education and of professional improvement, it is the medium in
which we can work, it is our hope of children. To take away our
wealth is to maim us. There is nothing humiliating in such an
avowal. It is merely an assertion of the integrity of one’s
life and work. As a matter of fact no class is so well fitted to
face the threat of a proletarian revolution as we harmless rich. It
is the class that produces generals, explorers, inventors,
statesmen. A social revolution with its stern attendant
regimentation would bear most heavily on the relatively
undisciplined class of working people. The disciplined class of the
middling rich is better prepared to meet such an eventuality.
Accordingly it is no mere selfishness or complacency that leads the
middling rich to oppose the pretensions of proletarianism on one
side and of capitalism on the other. It is rather the assertion of
sound middle class morality against two opposite yet somewhat
allied forms of social immorality—the strength that
exaggerates its claims, and the weakness that claims all the
privileges of strength.

We are useful too as conserving certain valuable ideas. When I
mention the idea of the right of private property, I [pg
111]expect to be laughed at by a large class of enthusiasts.
Yet all of civilization has been built up on the distinction
between meum and tuum. Without this idea there is
not the slightest inducement to persistent individual effort nor
possibility of progress for the individual or for the race. The
fruitful diversities, the germinative inequalities between men all
depend on this right. And today the right to one’s own is
doubly under attack from the violence of laboring men, and the
guile of those in positions of financial trust. The strikers who
offer as an argument the burning of a mine or wrecking of a mill,
and the directors who manipulate corporation accounts to pay
unearned dividends, are both undermining the right of property.
Against such counsels of force and fraud, the representatives of
the common sense and funded wisdom of mankind are the middling
rich. It is an unromantic service—doubtless breaking other
people’s windows or scaling their bank accounts is much more
thrilling—it is a public service obviously tinged with
self-interest, but none the less a public service of high and
timely importance. The business of keeping the sanity of the world
intact as against the wilder expressions of social discontent, and
the uglier expressions of personal envy and greed, may seem to lack
zest and originality today. History may well take a different view
of the matter. It would not be surprising to find a posthumous
aureole of idealism conferred upon those who amid the trumpeting of
money market messiahs, and the braying of self-appointed
remodellers of the race, simply stood quietly on their own
inherited rights and principles.

Such are some not wholly minor uses for the middling rich.
Should they be abolished, many of the pleasanter facts and
appearances of the world would disappear with them. The other day I
whisked in one of their motor cars through miles of green
Philadelphia suburbs dappled with pink magnolia trees and white
fruit blossoms—everywhere charming houses, velvety lawns,
tidy gardens. The establishing of a little paradise like that is of
course a [pg 112]selfish enterprise—a mere meeting of
the push and foresight of real estate operators with the thrift and
sentiment of householders, yet it is an advantage inevitably
shared, a benefit to the entire community, an example in reasonable
working, living, and playing.

On the side of play we should especially miss these harmless
rich. The sleek horses on a thousand bridle paths and meadows are
theirs, the smaller winged craft that still protest against the
pollution of the sea by the reek of coal and the stench of
gasoline; of their furnishing are the graceful and widely shared
spectacles not only of the minor yacht racing but of the field
sports generally. They constitute our militia. The survival in the
world of such gentler accomplishments as fencing, canoeing, and
exploration rests with the middling rich. They write our books and
plays, compose our music, paint our pictures, carve our statues.
The pleasanter unconscious pageantry of our life is conducted by
their sons and daughters. To be nice, to indulge in nice
occupations, to express happiness—this is not even today a
reproach to any one. Indeed if any approach to the dreamed
socialized state ever be made, it will come less through
regimentation than through imitation of those persons of middle
condition who have managed to be reasonably faithful in their
duties, and moderate in their pleasures. To keep a clean mind in a
clean body is the prerogative of no class, but the lapses from this
standard are unquestionably more frequent among the poor and the
very rich.

It is instructive in this regard to compare with the newspapers
that serve the middling rich, those that address the poor, and
those that are owned in the interest of well understood
capitalistic interests. The extremes of yellow journalism and of
avowedly capitalistic journalism, meet in a preference for
salacious or merely shocking news, and in a predilection for
blatant, sophistical, or merely nugatory and time-serving editorial
expressions. Between the two really allied types of newspapers are
a few which [pg 113]exercise a decent censorship over
questionable news, and habitually indulge in the luxury of sincere
editorial opinion. There are some exceptions to the rule. In our
own day we have seen a proletarian paper become a magnificent
editorial organ, while somewhat illogically maintaining a random
and sensational policy in its news columns. But generally the
distinction is unmistakable. Imagine the plight of New York
journalism if four papers, which I need not mention, ceased
publication. It would mean a distinct and immediate cheapening of
the mentality of the city. Then observe on any train who are
reading these papers. It is plain enough what class among us makes
decent journalism possible.

Much is to be said for the abolition of poverty, and something
for the reduction of inordinate wealth. Poverty is being much
reduced, and will be farther, the process being limited simply by
the degree to which the poor will educate and discipline
themselves. We shall never wholly do away with bad luck, bad
inheritance, wild blood, laziness, and incapacity: so some poverty
we shall always have, but much less than now, and less dire. The
fact that the large class of middling rich has been evolved from a
world where all began poor, is a promise of a future society where
poverty shall be the exception. But such increase of the wealth of
the world, and of the number of the virtually rich, will never be
attained by the puerile method of expropriating the present holders
of wealth. That would produce more poor people beyond
doubt—but its effect in enriching the present poor would be
inappreciable. You cannot change a man’s character and
capacity simply by giving him the wealth of another. In wholesale
expropriations and bequests the experiment has been many times
tried, and always with the same results. The wealth that could not
be assimilated and administered has always left the receiver or
grasper in all essentials poorer than he was before. Wealth is an
attribute of personality. It is not interchangeable like the parts
of a [pg
114]standardized machine. The futility of dispossessing the
middling rich would be as marked as its immorality.

This essentially personal character of wealth must affect the
views of those who would attack what are called the inordinate
fortunes. I hold no brief for or against the multi-millionaire. In
many cases I believe his wealth is as personal, assimilated and
legitimate as is the average moderate fortune. In many cases too, I
know that such gigantic wealth is in fact the product of unfair
craft and favoritism, is to that extent unassimilated and
illegitimate. Yet admitting the worst of great fortunes, I think a
prudent and fair minded man would hesitate before a general
programme of expropriation. He would consider that in many cases
the common weal needs such services as very wealthy people render,
he would reflect on the practical benefits to the world, of the
benevolent enterprises for education, research, invention, hygiene,
medicine, which are founded and supported by great wealth. In our
time The Rockefeller Institute will have stamped out that slow
plague of the south, the hook worm. To the obvious retort that the
government ought to do this sort of thing, the reply is equally
obvious, that historically governments have not done this sort of
thing until enlightened private enterprise has shown the way. Our
prudent observer of mankind in general, and of the very rich in
particular, would again reflect that, granting much of the
socialist indictment of capital as illgained, common sense requires
a statute of limitations. At a certain point restitution makes more
trouble than the possession of illegitimate wealth. Debts,
interest, and grudges cannot be indefinitely accumulated and
extended. It is the entire disregard of this simple and generally
admitted principle that has marred the socialist propaganda from
the first. From the point of view of fomenting hatred between
classes, to make every workingman regard himself as the residuary
legatee of all the grievances of all workingmen, at all times, may
be clever tactics, it is not a good way of making the workingman
[pg
115]see clearly what his actual grievance and expectancy of
redress are in his own day and time.

With increasingly heavy income and inheritance taxes, the very
rich will have to reckon. Yet the multi-millionaire’s evident
utility as the milch cow of the state, will cause statesmen, even
of the anti-capitalistic stamp, to waver at the point where the cow
threatens to dry up from over-milking. If the case, then, for
utterly despoiling the harmful rich, is by no means clear, the
prospect for the harmless rich may be regarded as fairly favorable.
For the moment, caught between the headiness of working folk, the
din of doctrinaires, and the wiles of corporate activity, the lot
of the middling rich is not the most happy imaginable. But they
seem better able to weather these flurries than the windy,
cloud-compelling divinities of the hour. From the survival of the
middling rich, the future common weal will be none the worse, and
it may even be better.

[pg
116]

Lecturing at
Chautauqua

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Contents

To render any real impression of the Chautauqua Summer Assembly,
I must approach this many-mooded subject from a personal point of
view. Others, more thoroughly informed in the arcana of the
Institution, have written the history of its development from small
beginnings to its present impressive magnitude, have analyzed the
theory of its intentions, and have expounded its extraordinary
influence over what may be called the middle-class culture of our
present-day America. It would be beyond the scope of my equipment
to add another solemn treatise to the extensive list already issued
by the tireless Chautauqua Press. My own experience of Chautauqua
was not that of a theoretical investigator, but that of a surprised
and wondering participant. It was the experience of an alien thrust
suddenly into the midst of a new but not unsympathetic world; and,
if the reader will make allowance for the personal equation, some
sense of the human significance of this summer seat of earnest
recreation may be suggested by a mere record of my individual
reactions.

I had heard of Chautauqua only vaguely, until, one sunny summer
morning, I suddenly received a telegram inviting me to lecture at
the Institution. I was a little disconcerted at the moment, because
I was enjoying an amphibious existence in a bathing-suit, and was
inclined to shudder at the thought of putting on a collar in July;
but, after an hour or two, I managed to imagine that telegram as a
Summons from the Great Unknown, and it was in a proper spirit of
adventure that I flung together a few books, and climbed into the
only available upper berth on a discomfortable train that rushed me
westward.

[pg
117]In some sickly hour of the early morning, I was cast out
at Westfield, on Lake Erie,—a town that looked like the
back-yard of civilization, with weeds growing in it. Thence a
trolley car, climbing over heightening hills that became
progressively more beautiful, hauled me ultimately to the entrance
of what the cynical conductor called “The Holy City.” A
fence of insurmountable palings stretched away on either hand; and,
at the little station, there were turn-stiles, through which
pilgrims passed within. Most people pay money to obtain admittance;
but I was met by a very affable young man from Dartmouth, whose
business it was to welcome invited visitors, and by him I was
steered officially through unopposing gates. I liked this young man
for his cheerful clothes and smiling countenance; but I was rather
appalled by the agglomeration of ram-shackle cottages through which
we passed on our way to the hotel.

I say “the hotel,” for the Chautauqua Settlement
contains but one such institution. It carries the classic name of
Athenæum; but the first view of it occasioned in my sensitive
constitution a sinking of the heart. The edifice dates from the
early-gingerbread period of architecture. It culminates in a
horrifying cupola, and is colored a discountenancing brown. The
first glimpse of it reminded me of the poems of A.H. Clough, whose
chief merit was to die and to offer thereby an occasion for a grave
and twilit elegy by Matthew Arnold. Clough’s life-work was a
continual asking of the question, “Life being unbearable, why
should I not die?”—while echo, that commonplace and
sapient commentator, mildly answered, “Why?”: and this
was precisely the impression that I gathered from my initial vista
of the Athenæum between trees.

On entering the hotel I was greeted over the desk (with what
might be defined as a left-handed smile) by one of the leading
students of the university with which I am associated as a teacher.
He called out, “Front!” in the manner of an amateur who
is amiably aping the professional, [pg 118]and assigned me
to a scarcely comfortable room.

My first voluntary act in the Chautauqua Community was to take a
swim. But the water was tepid, and brown, and tasteless, and
unbuoyant; and I felt, rather oddly, as if I were swimming in a
gigantic cup of tea. From this initial experience I proceeded,
somewhat precipitately, to induce an analogy; and it seemed to me,
at the time, as if I had forsaken the roar and tumble of the
hoarse, tumultuous world, for the inland disassociated peace of an
unaware and loitering backwater.

With hair still wet and still dishevelled, I was met by the
Secretary of Instruction,—a man (as I discovered later) of
wise and humorous perceptions. By him I was informed that, in an
hour or so, I was to lecture, in the Hall of Philosophy, on (if I
remember rightly) Edgar Allan Poe. I combed my hair, and tried to
care for Poe, and made my way to the Hall of Philosophy. This
turned out to be a Greek temple divested of its walls. An oaken
roof, with pediments, was supported by Doric columns; and under the
enlarged umbrella thus devised, about a thousand people were
congregated to greet the new and unknown lecturer.

I honestly believe that that was the worst lecture I have ever
imposed upon a suffering audience. I had lain awake all night, in
an upper berth, on the hottest day of the year; I had found my swim
in inland water unrefreshing; and, at the moment, I really cared no
more for Edgar Allan Poe than I usually care for the sculptures of
Bernini, the paintings of Bouguereau, or the base-ball playing of
the St. Louis “Browns.” This feeling was, of course,
unfair to Poe, who is (with all his emptiness of content) an
admirable artist; but I was tired at the time. It pained me
exceedingly to listen, for an hour, to my own dull and
unilluminated lecture. And yet (and here is the pathetic point that
touched me deeply) I perceived gradually that the audience was
listening not only attentively but [pg 119]eagerly. Those
people really wanted to hear whatever the lecturer should say: and
I wandered back to the depressing hotel with bowed head, actuated
by a new resolve to tell them something worthy on the morrow.

That afternoon and evening I strolled about the summer
settlement of Chautauqua; and (in view of my subsequent shift of
attitude) I do not mind confessing that this first aspect of the
community depressed me to a perilous melancholy. I beheld a
landscape that reminded me of Wordsworth’s Windermere, except
that the lake was broader and the hills less high, deflowered and
defamed by the huddled houses of the Chautauqua settlers. The lake
was lovely; and, with this supreme adjective, I forbear from
further effort at description. Upon the southern shore, a natural
grove of noble and venerable trees had been invaded by a crowded
horror of discomfortable tenements, thrown up by carpenters with a
taste for machine-made architectural details, and colored a sickly
green, an acid yellow, or an angry brown. The Chautauqua
Settlement, which is surrounded by a fence of palings, covers only
two or three square miles of territory; and, in the months of July
and August, between fifteen and twenty thousand people are crowded
into this constricted area. Hence a horror of unsightly
dormitories, spawning unpredictable inhabitants upon the ambling,
muddy lanes.

There have been, in the history of this Assembly, a few salutary
fires,—as a result of which new buildings have been erected
which are comparatively easy on the eyes. The Hall of Philosophy is
really beautiful, and is nobly seated among memorable trees at the
summit of a little hill. The Aula Christi tried to be beautiful,
and failed; but at least the good intention is apparent. The
Amphitheatre (which seats six or seven thousand auditors) is
admirably adapted to its uses; and some of the more recent business
buildings, like the Post Office, are inoffensive to the unexacting
observer. A wooded peninsula, which is pleasantly laid out as a
park, projects into [pg 120]the lake; and,
at the point of this, has lately been erected a campanile
which is admirable in both color and proportion. Indeed, when a
fanfaronnade of sunset is blown wide behind it, you suffer a sudden
tinge of homesickness for Venice or Ravenna. It is good enough for
that. But beside it is a helter-skelter wooden edifice which
reminds you of Surf Avenue at Coney Island. Indeed, the Settlement
as a whole exhibits still an overwhelmment of the unæsthetic,
and appalls the eye of the new-comer from a more considerative
world.

On the way back from the lovely campanile to the hotel,
I stumbled over a scattering of artificial hillocks surrounding two
mud-puddles connected by a gutter. This monstrosity turned out to
be a relief-map of Palestine. Little children, with uncultivated
voices, shouted at each other as they lightly leaped from Jerusalem
to Jericho; and waste-paper soaked itself to dingy brown in the
insanitary Sea of Galilee.—Then I encountered a wooden
edifice with castellated towers and machicolated battlements, which
called itself (with a large label) the Men’s Club; and from
this I fled, with almost a sense of relief, to the hotel itself,
now sprawling low and dark beneath its Boston-brown-bread
cupola.

Thus my first impression of Chautauqua was one of melancholy and
resentment. But, in the subsequent few days, this emotion was
altered to one of impressible satiric mirth; and, subsequently
still, it was changed again to an emotion of wondering and humble
admiration. I had been assured at the outset, by one who had
already tried it, that, if I stayed long enough, I should end up by
liking Chautauqua; and this is precisely what happened to me before
a week was out.

But meanwhile I laughed very hard for three days. The thing that
made me laugh most was the unexpected experience of enduring the
discomfiture of fame. Chautauqua is a constricted community; and
any one who lectures there becomes, by that very fact, a famous
person [pg 121]in this little backwater of the world,
until he is supplanted (for fame is as fickle as a ballet-dancer)
by the next new-comer to the platform. The Chautauqua Press
publishes a daily paper, a weekly review, a monthly magazine and a
quarterly; and these publications report your lectures, tell the
story of your life, comment upon your views of this and that,
advertise your books, and print your picture. Everybody knows you
by sight, and stops you in the street to ask you questions. Thus,
on your way to the Post Office, you are intercepted by some kindly
soul who says: “I am Miss Terwilliger, from Montgomery,
Alabama; and do you think that Bernard Shaw is really an immoral
writer?” or, “I am Mrs. Winterbottom, of Muncie,
Indiana; and where do you think I had better send my boy to school?
He is rather a backward boy for his age—he was ten last
April—but I really think that if, etc.”

Then, when you return to the hotel, you observe that everybody
is rocking vigorously on the veranda, and reading one of your
books. This pleases you a little; for, though an actor may look his
audience in the eyes, an author is seldom privileged to see his
readers face to face. Indeed, he often wonders if anybody ever
reads his writings, because he knows that his best friends never
do. But very soon this tender sentiment is disrupted. There comes a
sudden resurrection of the rocking-chair brigade, a rush of readers
with uplifted fountain-pens, and a general request for the
author’s autograph upon the flyleaf of his volume. All of
this is rather flattering; but afterward these gracious and
well-meaning people begin to comment on your lectures, and tell you
that you have made them see a great light. And then you find
yourself embarrassed.

It is rather embarrassing to be embarrassed.

One enthusiastic lady, having told me her name and her address,
assaulted me with the following commentary:—“I heard
you lecture on Stevenson the other day; and ever since then I have
been thinking how very much [pg 122]like Stevenson
you are. And today I heard you lecture on Walt Whitman: and all
afternoon I have been thinking how very much like Whitman you are.
And that is rather puzzling—isn’t it?—because
Stevenson and Whitman weren’t at all like each
other,—were they?”

I smiled, and told the lady the simple truth; but I do not think
she understood me. “Ah, madam,” I said, “wait
until you hear me lecture about Hawthorne….”

For (and now I am freely giving the whole game away) the secret
of the art of lecturing is merely this:—on your way to the
rostrum you contrive to fling yourself into complete sympathy with
the man you are to talk about, so that, when you come to speak, you
will give utterance to his message, in terms that are
suggestive of his style. You must guard yourself from ever
attempting to talk about anybody whom you have not (at some time or
other) loved; and, at the moment, you should, for sheer affection,
abandon your own personality in favor of his, so that you may
become, as nearly as possible, the person whom it is your business
to represent. Naturally, if you have any ear at all, your sentences
will tend to fall into the rhythm of his style; and if you have any
temperament (whatever that may be) your imagined mood will diffuse
an ineluctable aroma of the author’s personality.

This at least, is my own theory of lecturing; and, in the
instance of my talk on Hawthorne, I seem to have carried it out
successfully in practice. I must have attained a tone of sombre
gray, and seemed for the moment a meditative Puritan under a
shadowy and steepled hat; for, at the close of the lecture, a
silvery-haired and sweet-faced woman asked me if I wouldn’t
be so kind as to lead the devotional service in the Baptist House
that evening. I found myself abashed. But a previous engagement
saved me; and I was able to retire, not without honor, though with
some discomfiture.

This previous engagement was a steamboat ride upon the lake.
When you want to give a sure-enough party at [pg 123]Chautauqua, you
charter a steamboat and escape from the enclosure, having seduced a
sufficient number of other people to come along and sing. On this
particular evening, the party consisted of the Chautauqua School of
Expression,—a bevy of about thirty young women who were
having their speaking voices cultivated by an admired friend of
mine who is one of the best readers in America; and they sang with
real spirit, so soon as we had churned our way beyond remembrance
of (I mean no disrespect) the Baptist House. But this boat-ride had
a curious effect on the four or five male members of the party. We
touched at a barbarous and outrageous settlement, named (if I
remember rightly) Bemus Point; and hardly had the boat been docked
before there ensued a hundred-yard dash for a pair of swinging
doors behind which dazzled lights splashed gaudily on soapy
mirrors. I did not really desire a drink at the time; but I took
two, and the other men did likewise. I understood at once (for I
must always philosophize a little) why excessive drinking is
induced in prohibition states. Tell me that I may not laugh, and I
wish at once to laugh my head off,—though I am at heart a
holy person who loves Keats. This incongruous emotion must have
been felt, under this or that influence of external inhibition, by
everyone who is alive enough to like swimming, and Dante, and Weber
and Fields, and Filipino Lippi, and the view of the valley
underneath the sacred stones of Delphi.

Within the enclosure of Chautauqua one does not drink at all;
and I infer that this regulation is well-advised. I base this
inference upon my gradual discovery that all the regulations of
this well-conducted Institution have been fashioned sanely to
contribute to the greatest good of the greatest number. That is my
final, critical opinion. But how we did dash for the swinging doors
at Bemus Point!—we four or five simple-natured human beings
who were not, in any considerable sense, drinking men at all.

[pg
124]Then the congregated School of Expression tripped ashore
with nimble ankles; and there ensued a general dance at a pavilion
where a tired boy maltreated a more tired piano, and one paid a
dime before, or after, dancing. One does not dance at Chautauqua,
even on moon-silvery summer evenings:—and again the
regulation is right, because the serious-minded members of the
community must have time to read the books of those who lecture
there.

And this brings me to a consideration of the Chautauqua Sunday.
On this day the gates are closed, and neither ingress nor egress is
permitted. Once more I must admit that the regulation has been
sensibly devised. If admittance were allowed on Sunday, the grounds
would be overrun by picnickers from Buffalo, who would cast the
shells of hard-boiled eggs into the inviting Sea of Galilee; and
unless the officers are willing to let anybody in, they can devise
no practicable way of letting anybody out. Besides, the people who
are in already like to rest and meditate. But alas! (and at this
point I think that I begin to disapprove) the row-boats and canoes
are tied up at the dock, the tennis-courts are emptied, and the
simple exercise of swimming is forbidden. This desuetude of natural
and smiling recreation on a day intended for surcease of labor
struck me (for I am in part an ancient Greek, in part a
mediæval Florentine) as strangely irreligious. All day the
organ rumbles in the Amphitheatre (and of this I approved, because
I love the way in which an organ shakes you into sanctity), and
many meetings are held in various sectarian houses, the mood of
which is doubtless reverent—though all the while the rippling
water beckons to the high and dry canoes, and a gathering of
many-tinted clouds is summoned in the windy west to tingle with
Olympian laughter and Universal song. How much more wisely (if I
may talk in Greek terms for the moment) the gods take Sunday, than
their followers on this forgetful earth!

[pg
125]But we must change the mood if I am to speak again of
what amused me in the pagan days of my initiation at Chautauqua.
Life, for instance, at the ginger-bread hotel amused me oddly. To
one who lives in a metropolis throughout the working months, the
map of eating at Chautauqua seems incongruous. Dinner is served in
the middle of the day, at an hour when one is hardly encouraged to
the thought of luncheon; and at six P.M. a sort of breakfast is set
forth, which is denominated Supper. This Supper consists
of fruit, followed by buckwheat cakes, followed by meat or eggs;
and to eat one’s way through it induces a curious sense of
standing on one’s head. After two days I discovered a remedy
for this undesired dizziness. I turned the menu upside
down, and ordered a meal in the reverse order. The Supper itself
was a success; but the waitress (who, in the winter, teaches school
in Texas) disapproved of what she deemed my frivolous proceeding.
Her eyes took on an inward look beneath the pedagogical
eye-glasses; and there was a distinct furrowing of her forehead.
Thereafter I did not dare to overturn the menu, but ate my
way heroically backward. After all, our prandial prejudices are
merely the result of custom. There is no real reason why stewed
prunes should not be eaten at three A.M.

But this philosophical reflection reminds me that there is no
such hour at Chautauqua. At ten P.M. a carol of sweet chimes is
rung from the Italian campanile; and at that hour all good
Chautauquans go to bed. If you are by profession (let us say) a
writer, and are accustomed to be alive at midnight, you will find
the witching hours sad. Vainly you will seek companionship, and
will be reduced at last to reading the base-ball reports in the
newspapers of Cleveland, Ohio.

At the Athenæum you are passed about, from meal to meal,
like a one-card draw at poker. The hotel is haunted by Old
Chautauquans, who vie with each other to receive you with
traditional cordiality. The head-waitress steers [pg 126]you for
luncheon (I mean Dinner) to one table, for Supper to another, and
so on around the room from day to day. The process reminds you a
little of the procedure at a progressive euchre party. At each meal
you meet a new company of Old Chautauquans, and are expected to
converse: but many (indeed most) of these people are humanly
refreshing, and the experience is not so wearing as it sounds.

But you must not imagine from all that I have said that the life
of the lecturer at Chautauqua is merely frivolous. Not at all. You
get up very early, and proceed to Higgins Hall, a pleasant little
edifice (named after the late Governor of New York State) set
agreeably amid trees upon a rising knoll of verdure; and there you
converse for a time about the Drama, and for another time about the
Novel. In each of these two courses there were, perhaps, seventy or
eighty students,—male and female, elderly and young. I found
them much more eager than the classes I had been accustomed to in
college, and at least as well prepared. They came from anywhere,
and from any previous condition of servitude to the general cause
of learning; but I found them apt, and interested, and alive.

Now and then it appeared that their sense of humor was a little
less fantastic than my own; but I liked them very much, because
they were so earnest and simple and human and (what is
Whitman’s adjective?) adhesive.

And now I come to the point that converted me finally to
Chautauqua. I found myself, after a few days, liking the people
very much. In the afternoons I talked in the Doric Temple about
this man or that,—selected from my company of well-beloved
friends among “the famous nations of the dead”; and the
people came in hundreds and listened reverently—not, I am
very glad to know, because of any trick I have of setting words
together, but because of Stevenson and Whitman and the others, and
what they meant by living steadfast lives amid the hurly-[pg
127]burly of this roaring world, and steering heroically by
their stars. Some elderly matrons among the listeners brought their
knitting with them and toiled with busy hands throughout the
lecture; but they listened none the less attentively, and reduced
me to a mood of humble wonderment.

For I have often wondered (and this is, perhaps, the most
intimate of my confessions) how anybody can endure a
lecture,—even a good lecture, for I am not thinking merely of
my own. It is a passive exercise of which I am myself incapable. I,
for one, have always found it very irksome—as Carlyle has
phrased the experience—“to sit as a passive bucket and
be pumped into.” I always want to talk back, or rise and
remark “But, on the other hand…”; and, before
long, I find myself spiritually itching. This is, possibly, a
reason why I prefer canoeing to listening to sermons. Yet these
admirable Chautauquans submit themselves to this experience hour
after hour, because they earnestly desire to discover some
glimmering of “the best that has been known and thought in
the world.”

These fifteen or twenty thousand people have assembled for the
pursuit of culture—a pursuit which the Hellenic-minded
Matthew Arnold designated as the noblest in this life. But from
this fact (and here the antithetic formula asserts itself) we must
deduce an inference that they feel themselves to be uncultured. In
this inference I found a taste of the pathetic. I discovered that
many of the colonists at Chautauqua were men and women well along
in life who had had no opportunities for early education. Their
children, rising through the generations, had returned from the
state universities of Texas or Ohio or Mississippi, talking of
Browning, and the binominal theorem, and the survival of the
fittest, and the grandeur and decadence of the Romans, and the
entassus of Ionic columns, and the doctrine of laissez
faire; and now their elders had set out to endeavor to [pg
128]catch up with them. This discovery touched me with both
reverence and pathos. An attempt at what may be termed, in the
technical jargon of base-ball, a “delayed steal” of
culture, seemed to me little likely to succeed. Culture, like
wisdom, cannot be acquired: it cannot be passed, like a dollar
bill, from one who has it to one who has it not. It must be
absorbed, early in life, through birth or breeding, or be gathered
undeliberately through experience. A child of five with a French
governess will ask for his mug of milk with an easier Gallic grace
than a man of eighty who has puzzled out the pronunciation from a
text-book. There is, apparently, no remedy for this. Love the
Faerie Queene at twelve, or you will never really love it
at seventy: or so, at least, it seems to me. And yet the desire to
learn, in gray-haired men and women who in their youth were
battling hard for a mere continuance of life itself, and founding
homesteads in a book-less wilderness, moved me to a quick
exhilaration.

Most of the people at Chautauqua come either from the south or
from the middle west. They pronounce the English language either
without any r at all, or with such excessive emphasis upon
the r as to make up for the deficiency of their
fellow-seekers. In other words, these people are really American,
as opposed to cosmopolitan; and to live among them is—for a
world-wandering adventurer—to learn a lesson in Americanism.
Mr. Roosevelt once stated that Chautauqua is the most American
institution in America; and this statement—like many others
of his inspired platitudes—begins to seem meaningful upon
reflection.

At one time or another I have drifted to many different corners
of the world; but my residence at Chautauqua was my only experience
of a democracy. In this community there are no special privileges.
If the President of the Institution had wished to hear me lecture
(he never did, in fact—though we used to play tennis
together, at which game he proved himself easily the better man) he
would [pg
129]have been required to come early and take his chance at
getting a front seat; and once, when I ventured to attend a lecture
by one of my colleagues, I found myself seated beside that very
waitress in the Athenæum who had disapproved of my method of
ordering a meal. All the exercises are open equally to
anybody—first come, first served—and the boy who blacks
your boots may turn out to be a Sophomore at Oberlin. Teachers in
Texas high-schools sweep the floors or shave you, and the raucous
newsboy is earning his way toward the University of Illinois. All
this is a little bewildering at first; but in a day or two you grow
to like it.

This free-for-all spirit that permeates Chautauqua reminds me to
speak of the economic conduct of the Institution. The only
charge—except in the case of certain special courses—is
for admission to the grounds. The visitor pays fifty cents for a
franchise of one day, and more for periods of greater length, until
the ultimate charge of seven dollars and fifty cents for a season
ticket is attained. On leaving the grounds, he has to show his
ticket; and if it has expired he is taxed according to the term of
his delinquent lingering. Once free of the grounds, he may avail
himself of any of the privileges of the Assembly. Lectures, on an
infinite variety of subjects, are delivered hour after hour; and a
bulletin of these successive lectures is posted publicly and
printed in the daily paper. Every evening an entertainment of some
sort is given in the Amphitheatre, and this is eagerly attended by
swarming thousands. The Institution owns all the land within the
bounding palisades. Private cottages may be erected by individual
builders on lots leased for ninety-nine years; but the Institution
owns and operates the only hotel, and exercises an absolute empery
over the issuance of franchises to necessary tradesmen. The revenue
of the corporation is therefore rich; but all of it is expended in
importing the best lecturers that may be obtained, and in
furthering the general good of the general assembly. The [pg
130]entire system suggests the theoretic observation that an
absolute democracy can be instituted and maintained only by an
absolute monarchy. If all the people are to be free and equal, the
government must have absolute control of all the revenue. Here is,
perhaps, a principle for our presidential candidates to think
about.

But I do not wish to terminate this summer conversation on a
serious note; and I must revert, in closing, to some of the
recreations at Chautauqua. The first of these is tea. Every
afternoon, from four to five o’clock, the visitor lightly
flits from tea to tea,—making his excuses to one hostess in
order to dash onward to another. This is rather hard upon the
health, because it requires the deglutition of innumerable potions.
I have always maintained that tea is an admirable entity if it be
considered merely as a time of day, but that it is insidious if it
be considered as a beverage. At Chautauqua, tea is not only an hour
but a drink; and (though I am a sympathetic soul) I can only say
that those who like it like it. For my part, I preferred the
concoction sold at rustic soda-fountains, which is known locally as
a “Chautauqua highball,”—a ribald term devised by
college men who make up the by-no-means-despicable ball-team. This
beverage is compounded out of unfermented grape-juice and foaming
fizz-water; and, if it be taken absent-mindedly, seems to taste
like something.

But the standard recreation at Chautauqua is the habit of
impromptu eating in the open air. Every one invites you to go upon
a picnic. You take a steamer to some point upon the lake, or take a
trolley to a wild and deep ravine known by the somewhat unpoetic
name of the Hog’s Back; and then everybody sits around and
eats sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, and considers the occasion a
debauch. This formality resembles great good fun,—especially
as there are girls who laugh, and play, and threaten to disconcert
you on the morrow when you solemnly arise to lecture on the
Religion of Emerson. [pg 131]But
picnic-baskets out of doors are rather hard on the digestion.

Perhaps I should record also, as a curious experience, that I
was required to appear as one of the guests of honor at a large
reception. This meant that I had to stand in line, with certain
other marionettes, and shake hands with an apparently endless
procession of people who were themselves as bored as were the
guests of honor. I determined then and there that I should never
run for President,—not even in response to an irresistible
appeal from the populace. I had never suspected before that there
could be so many hands without the touch of nature in them. I shook
hands mechanically, chatting all the while with a humorous and
human woman who stood next to me in the line of the
attacked—until suddenly I felt the sensitive and tender grasp
of a sure-enough hand, reminding me of friends and one or two women
it has been a holiness to know. My attention was attracted by the
thrill. I turned swiftly—and I looked upon a little bent old
woman who was blind. She had a voice, too, for she spoke to me
… and,—well, I was very glad that I went to that
reception.

And many other matters I remember fondly,—a certain lonely
hill at sunset, whence you looked over wide water to distant
dream-enchanted shores; the urbanity and humor of the wise
directors of the Institution; the manner of many young students who
discerned an unadmitted sanctity beneath the smiling conversations
of those summer hours; my own last lecture, on “The
Importance of Enjoying Life”; the people who walked with me
to the station and whom I was sorry to leave; and the oddly-minded
student behind the desk of the hotel; and an old man from Kentucky
who cared about Walt Whitman after I had talked about his
ministrations in the army hospitals; and the trees, and the
reverberating organ, and, beneath a benison of midnight peace, the
hushed moon-silvery surface of the lake. It is, indeed, a memorable
experience to have lectured at Chautauqua.

[pg
132]

Academic Leadership

Return to Table of
Contents

Any one who has traveled much about the country of recent years
must have been impressed by the growing uneasiness of mind among
thoughtful men. Whether in the smoking car, or the hotel corridor,
or the college hall, everywhere, if you meet them off their guard
and stripped of the optimism which we wear as a public convention,
you will hear them saying in a kind of sad amazement, “What
is to be the end of it all?” They are alarmed at the
unsettlement of property and the difficulties that harass the man
of moderate means in making provision for the future; they are
uneasy over the breaking up of the old laws of decorum, if not of
decency, and over the unrestrained pursuit of excitement at any
cost; they feel vaguely that in the decay of religion the bases of
society have been somehow weakened. Now, much of this sort of talk
is as old as history, and has no special significance. We are prone
to forget that civilization has always been a tour de
force, so to speak, a little hard-won area of order and
self-subordination amidst a vast wilderness of anarchy and
barbarism that are with difficulty held in check and are
continually threatening to overrun their bounds. But that is
equally no reason for over-confidence. Civilization is like a ship
traversing an untamed sea. It is a more complex machine in our day,
with command of greater forces, and might seem correspondingly
safer than in the era of sails. But fresh catastrophes have shown
that the ancient perils of navigation still confront the largest
vessel, when the crew loses its discipline or the officers neglect
their duty; and the analogy is not without its warning.

[pg
133]Only a year after the sinking of the Titanic I
was crossing the ocean, and it befell by chance that on the
anniversary of that disaster we passed not very far from the spot
where the proud ship lay buried beneath the waves. The evening was
calm, and on the lee deck a dance had been hastily organized to
take advantage of the benign weather. Almost alone I stood for
hours at the railing on the windward side, looking out over the
rippling water where the moon had laid upon it a broad street of
gold. Nothing could have been more peaceful; it was as if Nature
were smiling upon earth in sympathy with the strains of music and
the sound of laughter that reached me at intervals from the
revelling on the other deck. Yet I could not put out of my heart an
apprehension of some luring treachery in this scene of
beauty—and certainly the world can offer nothing more
wonderfully beautiful than the moon shining from the far East over
a smooth expanse of water. Was it not in such a calm as this that
the unsuspecting vessel, with its gay freight of human lives, had
shuddered, and gone down, forever? I seemed to behold a symbol; and
there came into my mind the words we used to repeat at school, but
are, I do not know just why, a little ashamed of to-day:

Something like this, perhaps, is the feeling of many
men—men by no means given to morbid gusts of panic—amid
a society that laughs overmuch in its amusement and exults in the
very lust of change. Nor is their anxiety quite the same as that
which has always disturbed the reflecting spectator. At other times
the apprehension has been lest the combined forces of order might
not be strong enough to withstand the ever-threatening inroads of
those [pg
134]who envy barbarously and desire recklessly; whereas
today the doubt is whether the natural champions of order
themselves shall be found loyal to their trust, for they seem no
longer to remember clearly the word of command that should unite
them in leadership. Until they can rediscover some common ground of
strength and purpose in the first principles of education and law
and property and religion, we are in danger of falling a prey to
the disorganizing and vulgarizing domination of ambitions which
should be the servants and not the masters of society.

Certainly, in the sphere of education there is a growing belief
that some radical reform is needed; and this dissatisfaction is in
itself wholesome. Boys come into college with no reading and with
minds unused to the very practice of study; and they leave college,
too often, in the same state of nature. There are even those,
inside and outside of academic halls, who protest that our higher
institutions of learning simply fail to educate at all. That is
slander; but in sober earnest, you will find few experienced
college professors, apart from those engaged in teaching purely
utilitarian or practical subjects, who are not convinced that the
general relaxation is greater now than it was twenty years ago. It
is of considerable significance that the two student essays which
took the prizes offered by the Harvard Advocate in 1913
were both on this theme. The first of them posed the question:
“How can the leadership of the intellectual rather than the
athletic student be fostered?” and was virtually a sermon on
a text of President Lowell’s: “No one in close touch
with American education has failed to notice the lack among the
mass of undergraduates of keen interest in their studies, and the
small regard for scholarly attainment.”

Now, the Advocate prizeman has his specific remedy, and
President Lowell has his, and other men propose other systems and
restrictions; but the evil is too deep-seated [pg 135]to be
reached by any superficial scheme of honors or to be charmed away
by insinuating appeals. The other day Mr. William F. McCombs,
chairman of the National Committee which engineered a college
president into the White House, gave this advice to our academic
youth: “The college man must forget—or never let it
creep into his head—that he’s a highbrow. If it does
creep in, he’s out of politics.” To which one might
reply in Mr. McCombs’s own dialect, that unless a man can
make himself a force in politics (or at least in the larger life of
the State) precisely by virtue of being a “highbrow,”
he had better spend his four golden years otherwhere than in
college. There it is: the destiny of education is intimately bound
up with the question of social leadership, and unless the college,
as it used to be in the days when the religious hierarchy it
created was a real power, can be made once more a breeding place
for a natural aristocracy, it will inevitably degenerate into a
school for mechanical apprentices or into a pleasure resort for the
jeunesse dorée (sc. the “gold
coasters”). We must get back to a common understanding of the
office of education in the construction of society, and must
discriminate among the subjects that may enter into the curriculum,
by their relative value towards this end.

A manifest condition is that education should embrace the means
of discipline, for without discipline the mind will remain
inefficient, just as surely as the muscles of the body, without
exercise, will be left flaccid. That should seem to be a
self-evident truth. Now it may be possible to derive a certain
amount of discipline out of any study, but it is a fact,
nevertheless, which cannot be gainsaid, that some studies lend
themselves to this use more readily and effectively than others.
You may, for instance, if by extraordinary luck you get the perfect
teacher, make English literature disciplinary by the hard
manipulation of ideas; but in practice it almost inevitably happens
that a course in English literature either degenerates into the
dull [pg
136]memorizing of dates and names or, rising into the O
Altitudo, evaporates in romantic gush over beautiful passages. This
does not mean, of course, that no benefit may be obtained from such
a study, but it does preclude English literature generally from
being made the backbone, so to speak, of a sound curriculum. The
same may be said of French and German. The difficulties of these
tongues in themselves, and the effort required of us to enter into
their spirit, imply some degree of intellectual gymnastics, but
scarcely enough for our purpose. Of the sciences it behooves one to
speak circumspectly, and undoubtedly mathematics and physics, at
least, demand such close attention and such firm reasoning as to
render them an essential part of any disciplinary education. But
there are good grounds for being sceptical of the effect of the
non-mathematical sciences on the immature mind. Any one who has
spent a considerable portion of his undergraduate time in a
chemical laboratory, for example, as the present writer has done,
and has the means of comparing the results of such elementary and
pottering experimentation with the mental grip required in the
humanistic courses, must feel that the real training obtained
therein was almost negligible. If I may draw further from my own
observation I must say frankly that, after dealing for a number of
years with manuscripts prepared for publication by college
professors of the various faculties, I have been forced to the
conclusion that science, in itself, is likely to leave the mind in
a state of relative imbecility. It is not that the writing of men
who got their early drill too exclusively, or even predominantly,
in the sciences lacks the graces of rhetoric—that would be
comparatively a small matter—but such men in the majority of
cases, even when treating subjects within their own field, show a
singular inability to think clearly and consecutively, so soon as
they are freed from the restraint of merely describing the process
of an experiment. On the contrary, the manuscript of a classical
scholar, despite the present dry-rot of philology, [pg 137]almost
invariably gives signs of a habit of orderly and well-governed
cerebration.

Here, whatever else may be lacking, is discipline. The sheer
difficulty of Latin and Greek, the highly organized structure of
these languages, the need of scrupulous search to find the nearest
equivalents for words that differ widely in their scope of meaning
from their derivatives in any modern vocabulary, the effort of
lifting one’s self out of the familiar rut of ideas into so
foreign a world, all these things act as a tonic exercise to the
brain. And it is a demonstrable fact that students of the classics
do actually surpass their unclassical rivals in any field where a
fair test can be made. At Princeton, for instance, Professor West
has shown this superiority by tables of achievements and grades,
which he published in the Educational Review for March,
1913; and a number of letters from various parts of the country,
printed in the Nation, tell the same story in striking
fashion. Thus, a letter from Wesleyan (September 7, 1911) gives
statistics to prove that the classical students in that university
outstrip the others in obtaining all sorts of honors, commonly even
honors in the sciences. Another letter (May 8, 1913) shows that in
the first semester in English at the University of Nebraska the
percentage of delinquents among those who entered with four years
of Latin was below 7; among those who had three years of Latin and
one or two of a modern language the percentage rose to 15; two
years of Latin and two years of a modern language, 30 per cent.;
one year or less of Latin and from two to four years of a modern
language, 35 per cent. And in the Nation of April 23,
1914, Prof. Arthur Gordon Webster, the eminent physicist of Clark
University, after speaking of the late B.O. Peirce’s early
drill and life-long interest in Greek and Latin, adds these
significant words: “Many of us still believe that such a
training makes the best possible foundation for a scientist.”
There is reason to think that this opinion is daily gaining ground
among those who are [pg 138]zealous that the
prestige of science should be maintained by men of the best
calibre.

The disagreement in this matter would no doubt be less, were it
not for an ambiguity in the meaning of the word
“efficient” itself. There is a kind of efficiency in
managing men, and there also is an intellectual efficiency,
properly speaking, which is quite a different faculty. The former
is more likely to be found in the successful engineer or business
man than in the scholar of secluded habits, and because often such
men of affairs received no discipline at college in the classics,
the argument runs that utilitarian studies are as disciplinary as
the humanistic. But efficiency of this kind is not an academic
product at all, and is commonly developed, and should be developed,
in the school of the world. It comes from dealing with men in
matters of large physical moment, and may exist with a mind utterly
undisciplined in the stricter sense of the word. We have had more
than one illustrious example in recent years of men capable of
dominating their fellows, let us say in financial transactions, who
yet, in the grasp of first principles and in the analysis of
consequences, have shown themselves to be as inefficient as
children.

Probably, however, few men who have had experience in education
will deny the value of discipline to the classics, even though they
hold that other studies, less costly from the utilitarian point of
view, are equally educative in this respect. But it is further of
prime importance, even if such an equality, or approach to
equality, were granted, that we should select one group of studies,
and unite in making it the core of the curriculum for the great
mass of undergraduates. It is true in education as in other matters
that strength comes from union, and weakness from division, and if
educated men are to work together for a common end, they must have
a common range of ideas, with a certain solidarity in their way of
looking at things. As matters actually are, the educated man feels
terribly [pg 139]his isolation under the scattering of
intellectual pursuits, yet too often lacks the courage to deny the
strange popular fallacy that there is virtue in sheer variety, and
that somehow well-being is to be struck out from the clashing of
miscellaneous interests rather than from concentration. In one of
his annual reports some years ago President Eliot, of Harvard,
observed from the figures of registration that the majority of
students still at that time believed the best form of education for
them was in the old humanistic courses, and therefore, he
argued, the other courses should be fostered. There was never
perhaps a more extraordinary syllogism since the argal of
Shakespeare’s gravedigger. I quote from memory, and may
slightly misrepresent the actual statement of the influential
“educationalist,” but the spirit of his words, as
indeed of his practice, is surely as I give it. And the working of
this spirit is one of the main causes of the curious fact that
scarcely any other class of men in social intercourse feel
themselves, in their deeper concerns, more severed one from another
than those very college professors who ought to be united in the
battle for educational leadership. This estrangement is sometimes
carried to an extreme almost ludicrous. I remember once, in a small
but advanced college, the consternation that was awakened when an
instructor in philosophy went to a colleague—both of them now
associates in a large university—for information in a
question of biology. “What business has he with such
matters,” said the irate biologist; “let him stick to
his last, and teach philosophy—if he can!” That was a
polite jest, you will say. Perhaps; but not entirely. Philosophy is
indeed taught in one lecture hall, and biology in another, but of
conscious effort to make of education an harmonious driving force
there is next to nothing. And as the teachers, so are the
taught.

Such criticism does not imply that advanced work in any of the
branches of human knowledge should be curtailed; [pg 140]but it does
demand that, as a background to the professional pursuits, there
should be a common intellectual training through which all students
should pass, acquiring thus a single body of ideas and images in
which they could always meet as brother initiates.

We shall, then, make a long step forward when we determine that
in the college, as distinguished from the university, it is better
to have the great mass of men, whatever may be the waste in a few
unmalleable minds, go through the discipline of a single group of
studies—with, of course, a considerable freedom of choice in
the outlying field. And it will probably appear in experience that
the only practicable group to select is the classics, with the
accompaniment of philosophy and the mathematical sciences. Latin
and Greek are, at least, as disciplinary as any other subjects; and
if it can be further shown that they possess a specific power of
correction for the more disintegrating tendencies of the age, it
ought to be clear that their value as instruments of education
outweighs the service of certain other studies which may seem to be
more immediately utilitarian.

For it will be pretty generally agreed that efficiency of the
individual scholar and unity of the scholarly class are, properly,
only the means to obtain the real end of education, which is social
efficiency. The only way, in fact, to make the discipline demanded
by a severe curriculum and the sacrifice of particular tastes
required for unity seem worth the cost, is to persuade men that the
resulting form of education both meets a present and serious need
of society and promises to serve those individuals who desire to
obtain society’s fairer honors. As for the specific need of
society at the present day, it is not my purpose to open this
matter now, for the good reason that the editor of The Unpopular Review has already permitted me to argue
it at length in my article on Natural Aristocracy. Mr.
McCombs, speaking for the “practical” man, declares
that there is no place in politics for the intellectual aristocrat.
[pg
141]A good many of us believe that unless the very reverse
of this is true, unless the educated man can somehow, by virtue of
his education, make of himself a governor of the people in the
larger sense, and even to some extent in the narrow political
sense, unless the college can produce a hierarchy of character and
intelligence which shall in due measure perform the office of the
discredited oligarchy of birth, we had better make haste to divert
our enormous collegiate endowments into more useful channels.

And here I am glad to find confirmation of my belief in the
stalwart old Boke Named the Governour, published by Sir
Thomas Elyot in 1531, the first treatise on education in the
English tongue, and still, after all these years, one of the
wisest. It is no waste of time to take account of the theory held
by the humanists when study at Oxford and Cambridge was shaping
itself for its long service in giving to the oligarchic government
of Great Britain whatever elements it possessed of true
aristocracy. Elyot’s book is equally a treatise on the
education of a gentleman, and on the ordinance of government; for,
as he says elsewhere, he wrote “to instruct men in such
virtues as shall be expedient for them which shall have authority
in a weal public.” I quote from various parts of his work
with some abridgment, retaining the quaint spelling of the
original, and I beg the reader not to skip, however long the
citation may appear:

Such is the goal which the grave Sir Thomas pointed out to the
noble youth of his land at the beginning of England’s
greatness, and such, within the bounds of human frailty, has been
the ideal even until now which the two universities have held
before them. Naturally the method of training prescribed in the
sixteenth century for the attainment of this goal is antiquated in
some of its details, but it is no exaggeration, nevertheless, to
speak of the Boke Named the Governour as the very Magna
Charta of [pg 143]our education. The scheme of the humanist
might be described in a word as a disciplining of the higher
faculty of the imagination to the end that the student may behold,
as it were in one sublime vision, the whole scale of being in its
range from the lowest to the highest under the divine decree of
order and subordination, without losing sight of the immutable
veracity at the heart of all variation, which “is only the
praise and surname of virtue.” This was no new vision, nor
has it ever been quite forgotten. It was the whole meaning of
religion to Hooker, from whom it passed into all that is best and
least ephemeral in the Anglican Church. It was the basis, more
modestly expressed, of Blackstone’s conception of the British
Constitution and of liberty under law. It was the kernel of
Burke’s theory of statecraft. It is the inspiration of the
sublimer science, which accepts the hypothesis of evolution as
taught by Darwin and Spencer, yet bows in reverence before the
unnamed and incommensurable force lodged as a mystical purpose
within the unfolding universe. It was the wisdom of that child of
Stratford who, building better than he knew, gave to our literature
its deepest and most persistent note. If anywhere Shakespeare seems
to speak from his heart and to utter his own philosophy, it is in
the person of Ulysses in that strange satire of life as
“still wars and lechery” which forms the theme of
Troilus and Cressida. Twice in the course of the play
Ulysses moralizes on the causes of human evil. Once it is in an
outburst against the devastations of disorder:

And, in the same spirit, the second tirade of Ulysses is charged
with mockery at the vanity of the present and at man’s
usurpation of time as the destroyer instead of the preserver of
continuity:

To have made this vision of the higher imagination a true part
of our self-knowledge, in such fashion that the soul is purged of
envy for what is distinguished, and we feel ourselves fellows with
the preserving, rather than the destroying, forces of time, is to
be raised into the nobility of the intellect. To hold this
knowledge in a mind trained to fine efficiency and confirmed by
faithful comradeship, is to take one’s place with the
rightful governors of the people. Nor is there any narrow or
invidious exclusiveness in such an aristocracy, which differs in
its free hospitality from an oligarchy of artificial prescription.
The more its membership is enlarged, the greater is its power, and
the more secure are the privileges of each individual. Yet, if not
exclusive, an academic aristocracy must by its very nature be
exceedingly jealous of any levelling process which would shape
education to the needs of the intellectual proletariat, and so
diminish its own ranks. It cannot [pg 145]admit that, if
education is once levelled downwards, the whole body of men will of
themselves gradually raise the level to the higher range; for its
creed declares that elevation must come from leadership rather than
from self-motion of the mass. It will therefore be opposed to any
scheme of studies which relaxes discipline or destroys intellectual
solidarity. It will look with suspicion on any system which turns
out half-educated men with the same diplomas as the fully educated,
thinking that such methods of slurring over differences are likely
to do more harm by discouraging the ambition to attain what is
distinguished than good by spreading wide a thin veneer of culture.
In particular it will distrust the present huge overgrowth of
courses in government and sociology, which send men into the world
skilled in the machinery of statecraft and with minds sharpened to
the immediate demands of special groups, but with no genuine
training of the imagination and no understanding of the longer
problems of humanity, with no hold on the past, “amidst so
vast a fluctuation of passions and opinions, to concentre their
thoughts, to ballast their conduct, to preserve them from being
blown about by every wind of fashionable doctrine.” It will
set itself against any regular subjection of the “fierce
spirit of liberty,” which is the breath of distinction and
the very charter of aristocracy, to the sullen spirit of equality,
which proceeds from envy in the baser sort of democracy. It will
regard the character of education and the disposition of the
curriculum as a question of supreme importance; for its motto is
always, abeunt studia in mores.

Now this aristocratic principle has, so to speak, its
everlasting embodiment in Greek literature, from whence it was
taken over into Latin and transmitted, with much mingling of
foreign and even contradictory ideas, to the modern world. From
Homer to the last runnings of the Hellenic spirit you will find it
taught by every kind of precept and enforced by every kind of
example; nor was [pg 146]Shakespeare writing at hazard, but under
the instinctive guidance of genius, when he put his aristocratic
creed into the mouth of the hero who to the end remained for the
Greeks the personification of their peculiar wisdom. In no other
poetry of the world is the law of distinction, as springing from a
man’s perception of his place in the great hierarchy of
privilege and obligation, from the lowest human being up to the
Olympian gods, so copiously and magnificently set forth as in
Pindar’s Odes of Victory. And Æschylus was the
first dramatist to see with clear vision the primacy of the
intellect in the law of orderly development, seemingly at variance
with the divine immutable will of Fate, yet finally in mysterious
accord with it. When the philosophers of the later period came to
the creation of systematic ethics, they had only the task of
formulating what was already latent in the poets and historians of
their land; and it was the recollection of the fulness of such
instruction in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Platonic
Dialogues, with their echo in the Officia of Cicero, as if
in them were stored up all the treasures of antiquity, that raised
our Sir Thomas into wondering admiration:

There is no need to dwell on this aspect of the classics. He who
cares to follow their full working in this direction, as did our
English humanist, may find it exhibited in Plato’s political
and ethical scheme of self-development, or in Aristotle’s
ideal of the Golden Mean which combines magnanimity with
moderation, and elevation with self-knowledge. If a single word
were used to describe the [pg 147]character and
state of life upheld by Plato and Aristotle, as spokesmen of their
people, it would be eleutheria, liberty: the
freedom to cultivate the higher part of a man’s
nature—his intellectual prerogative, his desire of truth, his
refinements of taste—and to hold the baser part of himself in
subjection; the freedom, also, for its own perfection, and indeed
for its very existence, to impose an outer conformity to, or at
least respect for, the laws of this inner government on others who
are of themselves ungoverned. Such liberty is the ground of true
distinction; it implies the opposite of an equalitarianism which
reserves its honors and rewards for those who attain a bastard kind
of distinction by the cunning of leadership, without departing from
common standards—the demagogues who rise by flattery. But it
is, on the other hand, by no means dependent on the artificial
distinctions of privilege, and is peculiarly adapted to an age
whose appointed task must be to create a natural aristocracy as a
via media between an equalitarian democracy and a
prescriptive oligarchy or plutocracy. It is a notable fact that, as
the real hostility to the classics in the present day arises from
an instinctive suspicion of them as standing in the way of a
downward-levelling mediocrity, so, at other times, they have fallen
under displeasure for their veto on a contrary excess. Thus, in his
savage attack on the Commonwealth, to which he gave the significant
title Behemoth, Hobbes lists the reading of classical
history among the chief causes of the rebellion. “There
were,” he says, “an exceeding great number of men of
the better sort, that had been so educated as that in their youth,
having read the books written by famous men of the ancient Grecian
and Roman commonwealths concerning their polity and great actions,
in which books the popular government was extolled by that glorious
name of liberty, and monarchy disgraced by the name of tyranny,
they became thereby in love with their forms of government; and out
of these men were chosen the [pg 148]greatest part of
the House of Commons; or if they were not the greatest part, yet by
advantage of their eloquence were always able to sway the
rest.” To this charge Hobbes returns again and again, even
declaring that “the universities have been to this nation as
the Wooden Horse was to the Trojans.” And the uncompromising
monarchist of the Leviathan, himself a classicist of no
mean attainments, as may be known by his translation of Thucydides,
was not deceived in his accusation. The tyrannicides of Athens and
Rome, the Aristogeitons and Brutuses and others, were the heroes by
whose example the leaders of the French Revolution (rightly, so far
as they did not fall into the opposite, equalitarian extreme) were
continually justifying their acts:

And again, in the years of the Risorgimento, more than one of
the champions of Italian liberty went to death with those great
names on their lips.

So runs the law of order and right subordination. But if the
classics offer the best service to education by inculcating an
aristocracy of intellectual distinction, they are equally effective
in enforcing the similar lesson of time. It is a true saying of our
ancient humanist that “the longer it continueth in a name or
lineage, the more is nobility extolled and marvelled at.” It
is true because in this way our imagination is working with the
great conservative law of growth. Whatever may be in theory our
democratic distaste for the insignia of birth, we cannot get away
from the fact that there is a certain honor of inheritance, and
that we instinctively pay homage to one who represents a noble
name. There is nothing really illogical in this: for, as an English
statesman has put it, “the past is one of the elements of our
power.” He is the wise democrat who, with no opposition to
such a decree of Nature, endeavors to control its operation by
expecting noble service where the memory of nobility abides. When
[pg
149]last year Oxford bestowed its highest honor on an
American, distinguished not only for his own public acts but for
the great tradition embodied in his name, the Orator of the
University did not omit this legitimate appeal to the imagination,
singularly appropriate in its academic Latin:

Is there any man so dull of soul as not to be stirred by that
enumeration of civic services zealously inherited; or is there any
one so envious of the past as not to believe that such memories
should be honored in the present as an incentive to noble
emulation?

Well, we cannot all of us count Presidents and Ambassadors among
our ancestors, but we can, if we will, in the genealogy of the
inner life enroll ourselves among the adopted sons of a family in
comparison with which the Bruti and Decii of old and the Adamses of
to-day are veritable new men. We can see what defence
against the meaner depredations of the world may be drawn from the
pride of birth, when, as it sometimes happens, the obligation of a
great past is kept as a contract with the present; shall we forget
to measure the enlargement and elevation of mind which ought to
come to a man who has made himself the heir of the ancient Lords of
Wisdom? “To one small people,” as Sir Henry Maine has
said, in words often quoted, “it was given to create the
principle of [pg 150]Progress. That people was the Greek. Except
the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in this world which is
not Greek in its origin.” That is a hard saying, but scarcely
exaggerated. Examine the records of our art and our science, our
philosophy and the enduring element of our faith, our statecraft
and our notion of liberty, and you will find that they all go back
for their inspiration to that one small people, and strike their
roots into the soil of Greece. What we have added, it is well to
know; but he is the aristocrat of the mind who can display a
diploma from the schools of the Academy and the Lyceum, and from
the Theatre of Dionysus. What tradition of ancestral achievement in
the Senate or on the field of battle shall broaden a man’s
outlook and elevate his will equally with the consciousness that
his way of thinking and feeling has come down to him by so long and
honorable a descent, or shall so confirm him in his better judgment
against the ephemeral and vulgarizing solicitations of the hour?
Other men are creatures of the visible moment; he is a citizen of
the past and of the future. And such a charter of citizenship it is
the first duty of the college to provide.

I have limited myself in these pages to a discussion of what may
be called the public side of education, considering the classics in
their power to mould character and foster sound leadership in a
society much given to drifting. Of the inexhaustible joy and
consolation they afford to the individual, only he can have full
knowledge who has made the writers of Greece and Rome his friends
and counsellors through many vicissitudes of life. It is related of
Sainte-Beuve, who, according to Renan, read everything and
remembered everything, that one could observe a peculiar serenity
on his face whenever he came down from his study after reading a
book of Homer. The cost of learning the language of Homer is not
small; but so are all fair things difficult, as the Greek proverb
runs, and the reward in this case is precious beyond
estimation.

[pg
151]Nor need we forget another proverb from Greece, with its
spirit of “accommodation”—that the half is
sometimes greater than the whole. Even a moderate acquaintance with
the language, helped out by good translations (especially in such
form as the Loeb Classics are now offering, with the original and
the English on opposite pages), will go a surprising length towards
keeping a man, amid the exactions of a professional or otherwise
busy life, in possession of the heritage to which our age has grown
so perilously indifferent.

[pg
152]

Hypnotism, Telepathy,
and Dreams

Return to Table of
Contents

A good many good judges find the world more out of joint, and
moving with a more threatening rattling, than at any previous time
since the French Revolution, and think that this is largely because
the machine has lost too much of that regulation it used to get
from the religions. Much of the regulation came from an interest in
things wider than those directly revealed by sense.

Possibly a revival of such an interest may be promised by the
recent indications of a range of our forces, both physical and
psychic, far wider than previous experience has indicated. This
leads us to invite attention to some unusual psychic phenomena
evinced by persons of exceptional sensibilities not yet as well
understood, or even as carefully investigated, as perhaps they
deserve to be. The physical phenomena are outside of our present
purpose.

There are hundreds of well authenticated reports of super-usual
visions. The vast majority of them, however, were experienced when
the percipients were in bed, but believed themselves awake. But
almost everybody has often believed himself awake in bed, when he
was only dreaming. Hence the probability is overwhelming that most
of these super-usual experiences were had in dreams.

But it is certain that not all were, at least in dreams as
ordinarily understood; but there seems to be a waking dream state.
Foster’s visions virtually all came while he was awake, and
they were generally at once described by him as if he were
describing a landscape or a play. At times he very closely
identified himself with some personality of his visions, and acted
out the personality, just as Mrs. Piper has habitually done. The
following is an [pg 153]approximate instance, quoted by Bartlett
(The Salem Seer, p. 51f.):

Now it is hardly to be supposed that the young visitor could
ever have had this scene in his mind as vividly as Foster had. In
that case where and how did Foster get the vividness and emotion?
How do we get them in dreams? He dreamed while he was awake.

As Bartlett quotes this, and as it declares him to have been
present, he of course attests it by quoting it. So in each of
Bartlett’s quoted cases, the original witness is the reporter
in the newspaper, and Bartlett, who was present (he was
Foster’s traveling companion and business agent) thus
confirms it. We know Mr. Bartlett personally, and have thorough
confidence in his sanity and sincerity. We have also been at the
pains to learn that he commands the confidence and respect of his
fellow townsmen in Tolland, Connecticut, where he is passing a
green old age. Moreover, he does not interpret these phenomena by
“spiritism.”

We also had a sitting with Foster, in which he undoubtedly
showed abundant telepathy, and satisfied us that he was
fundamentally honest, though not always discriminating between his
involuntary impressions, and his natural impulses to help out their
coherence and interest.

Those who explain these things by denying their existence, were
at least excusable thirty, or even twenty, years ago, but since the
carefully sifted and authenticated and recorded evidence of recent
years, especially that gathered by the Society for Psychical
Research, the makers [pg 155]of such
explanations simply put themselves in the category of those who, in
Schopenhauer’s day, denied the telopsis which is now quite
generally recognized. He said their attitude should not be called
skeptical, but merely ignorant. This brings to mind an excellent
very practical friend who read the first number of this
Review, and praised it, but said:
“Don’t fool any more with Psychical Research and
Simplified Spelling.” We refrained from saying that we had
not known that he had ever studied either, and we would not say it
here if we were not confident that his aversion from the subject
will prevent his reading this.

To return to the manifestations: here are some other cases where
Foster identified himself with a personality of his vision.
(Bartlett, op. cit., 93.)

The above indicates what we will provisionally call Possession.
But it is not possession to the extent of complete expulsion of the
original consciousness, as in the trances of Home, Moses, and Mrs.
Piper.

And which is the following? (Bartlett, op. cit.,
103):

[pg
156]But here the Possession seems complete (Bartlett,
op. cit., 140). From the Melbourne Daily Age:

Now for some tentative explanation of these rather unusual
proceedings. It is generally known that a hypnotized person will
imagine things and do things willed by the hypnotizer, that the
sensibility of persons to hypnotism varies, and that persons
frequently hypnotized become increasingly susceptible to the
influence.

Now what is ordinarily called thought transference has all these
symptoms, and the combined indications seem to be that persons who
readily experience thought-transference are specially susceptible
to hypnotic influence, and get the transferred thought from almost
anybody, just as the recognized hypnotic subject gets it from his
hypnotizer; and that persons of excessive sensibility, like Foster,
Home, Mrs. Holland, Mrs. Piper and mediums generally—the
genuine ones,—simply get their impressions hypnotically from
their sitters.

But this explanation (?) by no means covers the whole situation.
In the first place, it does not cover the vividness and the
emotional content often displayed by the [pg 157]sensitive. The
sitter is very seldom conscious of anything approaching it. It
comes nearer to, in fact almost seems identical with, the frequent
vividness and intensity of dreams. But where do dreams come from,
whether in sleep, or in a waking “dream state” like
that of Foster and many other sensitives? They don’t come
from any assignable “sitter.” This present scribe
dreams architecture and bric-a-brac finer than any he ever saw, or
than any ever made. Yet he is no architect, or artist of any kind.
Where does it all come from?

Dreams, moreover, are filled with memories of forgotten things.
Where do they come from? Dreams, too, are by no means devoid of
truths not previously known to the dreamer, or, it would sometimes
seem, to anybody else. Where do they come from?

Du Prel and his school say they come from a “subliminal
self,” and Myers picks up the term and spreads it through
Anglo-Saxondom. But those queer dreams frequently include persons
who oppose the self—argue with it, and even down it,
sometimes very much for its information, regeneration and increased
stability. That does not seem like a house divided against itself;
such an one, we have on very high authority, is apt to fall. James,
cornered by his studies in Psychical Research, was inclined to
posit a “cosmic reservoir” of all thoughts and feelings
that ever existed, and of potentialities of all the thoughts and
feelings that are ever going to exist; and under various
designations, this cosmic reservoir or,—it seems a better
metaphor—the cosmic soul filling it, and dribbling into our
little souls,—is a guess of virtually all the philosophers
from James back to Plato, and farther still—into the
mists.

Moreover this guess is powerfully backed up by another guess:
men’s speculations have been reaching back for the beginning
of mind, until they recognize that a consistent doctrine of
evolution finds no beginning, and demands mind as a constituent of
the star-dust, and, when it really [pg 158]comes down to
the scratch, is unable to imagine matter unassociated with mind.
This is admirably expressed by James (Psychology I, 140):

That mind is not limited to this connection with matter, we see
proved a posteriori every day by the appearance from
some source, it may be only from the memories of
survivors, of minds whose accompanying matter is long since
dissipated.

Moreover, in life, the matter is changing constantly and
entirely—“renewed once in seven years.” Yet not
only does the “plan,” the “idea,” of the
material man remain the same, but his mind grows for forty, sixty,
sometimes eighty years, while the body begins to go down hill at
twenty-eight.

Moreover, we never see the sum of matter in the universe
increasing, and we do see the sum of mind increasing every time two
old thoughts coalesce into a new one, or even every time matter
assumes a new form before a perceiving intelligence, not to speak
of every time Mr. Bryan or Mr. Roosevelt opens his mouth. We cite
these last as the extreme examples of increase—in quantity.
We see another sort of increase every time Lord Bryce takes up his
pen—the mental treasures of the world are added to—the
contents of the cosmic reservoir worthily increased—the
cosmic soul greater and more significant than before.

Parts of it farther and farther removed in time and space [pg
159]seem to be manifesting themselves through the sensitives
every day: so the evidence is increasing that none of it has ever
been extinguished. The evidence that any part has been, is merely
the evidence that it has stopped flowing through each man when he
dies. But there are pretty strong indications that it has welled up
occasionally through another man, and yet with the original
individuality apparently even stronger than it was in the first
man—strong enough to make an alien body—Foster’s,
in the instances quoted, look and act like the original twin
body.

Yet while the cosmic soul idea seems very illuminating, and even
stimulating, as far as it goes, it soon lands us in the swamp of
paradox surrounding all our knowledge. How reconcile it with our
individuality—the individuality as dear as life
itself—virtually identical with life itself? Well, we
can’t reconcile them, at least just yet. But we can pull our
feet up from the swamp, and make a step that may be towards a
reconciliation. Each of our brains is a network of channels through
which the cosmic soul flows; and there are no two brains
alike—hence our individuality.

But those brains perish. Must individuality be conceded at the
cost of our mental continuity? Perhaps not. Grant even the original
mind-atom to be a constituent, or inseparable companion, of an
original matter-atom (wouldn’t it be more up to date to say
vibration in each case?), mind, as we have already tried to
demonstrate, is not limited, as matter seems to be, to those
primitive atoms.

The vague but almost unescapable notion of the cosmic soul also
opens up some hint of an explanation of hypnotism, including, of
course, thought transference. These vague hints or gleams on the
borderland of our knowledge are of course something like what must
be such hints of what we know as color, as go through the pigment
spots [pg
160]on the surface of one of the lower creatures. Such as
our limits are, we can express them only in metaphors. But for that
matter all of our language beyond a few material conceptions, is
metaphor from them. Well, on the hypothesis (or facing the fact, if
you prefer) of the cosmic soul, telepathy, hypnotism and all that
sort of thing at once affiliates itself with all our easy
conceptions of interflow—in fluids, gases, sounds, colors,
magnetism, electricity, etc. It’s all a vague groping, but
there seems something there which, as we evolve farther, we may get
clearer impressions of.

Well, to return to our sheep. Foster didn’t get the
clearness and intensity of his visions from the comparatively
indistinct and placid impressions in his sitters’ minds.
There must be something more than hypnotism from the sitter.

Now here is a tougher case which opens a new element of the
problem. It is from The Autobiography of a Journalist, by
W.J. Stillman, Boston, 1901, Vol. I, pp. 192-4: Not many of our
older readers will require any introduction of Stillman. For the
younger ones, we may say that he was a very eminent art-critic;
spent most of the latter half of his life abroad, being part of the
time our consul at Crete; wrote a history of the Cretan Rebellion,
and other books; and was a regular correspondent of The
Nation, and of The London Times. We never knew his
veracity questioned.

Here is the story:

A “spiritual medium,” Miss A. was “under the
control” of Stillman’s dead cousin
“Harvey.” The “possession” seems to have
been throughout free from trance. Stillman says:

To me they seem perhaps the nearest I have come to a
communication of something not known to any earthly intelligence,
and yet it may have been so known.

When manifestations of this general nature first attracted
systematic study, they were attributed, as already stated, to
telepathy from the sitter. Stillman knew Turner, and as Stillman
had an artist’s vividness of impression, the sensitive could
have got from him a pretty good idea of Turner, and have acted it
out. But how about the innumerable cases not unlike the Foster
cases quoted, where sensitives get impressions much more vivid than
the sitter appears capable of holding, and act them out with
dramatic verisimilitude of which the sitter is absolutely
incapable; and how about the innumerable [pg 163]cases where the
sensitive gets impressions and memories which the sitter never
had?

These have been accounted for as being picked up from absent
persons, by a kind of wireless telegraphy, for which we have
ventured, with the assistance of a couple of Grecian friends, to
suggest the name teloteropathy.

Well! In this Turner case, somebody somewhere,
may have known what neither the sensitive nor Stillman
knew of Turner’s method of work, and the sensitive’s
wireless may have picked up all those detailed impressions
and dramatic impressions of them from that unknown
somebody. But is that any easier to swallow than that old
Turner himself was the somebody—that his share of the cosmic
soul, or a sufficient portion of his share, flowed into or
hypnotized the sensitive, and made her act as she did?

And now let us go on to some of the developments of these
phenomena manifested by Mrs. Piper. Unlike the manifestations
already given, hers are not from waking dreams, but from dreams in
trance. Moreover, so far the sensitives have manifested impressions
of but one personality at a time, but Mrs. Piper has manifested one
by speech and, at the same time, another by writing, the
expressions of the two apparent personalities progressing
independently, with full coherence and consistency. Moreover, in
many of her trances she seemed as if surrounded by a crowd of
persons endeavoring, with different degrees of success, to express
themselves through her, or she endeavoring to express them. All
this of course, is counter to the impression prevailing during the
early years of her career, that her soul had left her body, and the
body was “possessed” by a postcarnate soul expressing
itself through her. The present aspect of the facts is more as if
she had impressions such as we all have in dreams, of any number of
personalities around her. Some of her typical manifestations may
give still further indications of interflowing of mental
impressions.

[pg
164]The George “Pelham” famous in the annals of
Psychical Research was a friend of the present writer, and his
alleged postcarnate self appeared through Mrs. Piper to the
following effect. There could not have been anything cooked up
about it; it was my first and only sitting with Mrs. Piper, who
knew nothing about me or my friends. In fact, the old theories of
some form of fraud, now, in the light of the vast accumulation of
later knowledge, seem ridiculous. However the phenomena have to be
explained, that explanation is out of date.

It turned out later that A. actually was low in his mind, and
that B., whom nobody present knew, was trying to get him
occupation. I knew nothing whatever about any such circumstances,
nor did Hodgson. To suppose that Mrs. Piper did, would be absurd.
But they were known to other minds “in the
body,” and hence the medium’s utterance of them is open
to the interpretation of teloteropathy. Similar instances are not
rare, but the interpretation of teloteropathy seems to be rapidly
losing probability.

In this instance, I was “connected with”
B., but only so far as he had become a professor at Yale long after
my graduation: I did not know him personally. But my intimate
connection with A. was not only direct, but through several persons
intimate with us both, including G.P. when living. Mere telepathy,
certainly mere telepathy [pg 165]from my mind,
would have “spotted” some one of these connections much
more readily than the alleged one with B., which was hardly a
connection at all.

The simplest solution for the whole business, though
perhaps not the most “scientific,” or even probable, is
that the spirit of G.P. was troubled about A. and habitually
thinking of me at the University Club as a Yale man, on my turning
up at the séance, was reminded of the solution of A.’s
troubles proposed through B., and wanted me to help.

And now to this rather commonplace manifestation comes an
interesting sequel illustrating the reach of mind spoken of at the
outset. Out of a perfectly clear sky came to me in New York on
April 8, 1894, the message from G.P., to look out for A., who was
low in his mind, and that B. was trying to get a place for him. On
May 29th, Hodgson writes me as follows, showing that the same thing
had come up through the heteromatic writing of A.’s wife
at Granada in Spain, and meant nothing to her or to A.

Being intensely busy, and not as much interested in the matter
as later experiences have made me, I did not at the moment catch
the full purport of Hodgson’s letter, or write him till June
5th, and did not keep any copy that I can find of my letter. He
wrote me on the 8th:

And I, the present scribe, certainly did not. A. did not. B.
alone did, with whatever persons he may have approached on the
matter, and Mrs. Piper had presumably never seen one of the group.
So where did Mrs. Piper and Mrs. A. get it? The only answers that
seem possible are that she and Mrs. A. either got it
teloteropathically from one of those absent, or that the
postcarnate George Pelham himself wrote her about it, and also told
me of it through Mrs. Piper’s organism in New York, and four
days later was working it into a cross-correspondence through Mrs.
A. in Spain. At first blush the latter seems easier; and I am not
sure but that it does on reflection.

Hodgson’s letter continues:

[pg
167]Now does not all this give a strong impression of an
interflow among minds all over—in New York (the place of the
sitting), Granada (Mrs. A.’s place of sojourn), Boston
(A.’s home), New Haven (B.’s home), and the universe in
general (G.P.’s apparent home)—of an interflow free
from the limitations of time and space, and independent of all
means of communication known to us?

This impression tends to grow deeper with farther study. We have
had a cross-correspondence between two incarnate intelligences and
one apparently postcarnate. Mr. Piddington has unearthed a
cross-correspondence between one apparently postcarnate
intelligence and seven “living” ones.

Perhaps the significance of cross-correspondences justifies a
little more specific treatment, and even the repetition of a
paragraph from the first number of this Review. The topic has lately attracted more attention
from the S.P.R. than any other.

If Mrs. Verrall in London and Mrs. Holland in India both, at
about the same time, write heteromatically about a subject that
they both understand, that is probably coincidence; but if both
write about it when but one of them understands it, that is
probably teloteropathy; and if both write about it when neither
understands it, and each of their respective writings is apparently
nonsense, but both make sense when put together, the only obvious
hypothesis is that both were inspired by a third mind.

There are many instances of strict cross-correspondence of this
type. The one we have given was perhaps more impressive than a
stricter one would be apt to be.

Accounts of sittings generally suggest apparent
intercommunication independent of time and space between [pg
168]postcarnate intelligences: often the controls say that
they will go and find other controls, and, generally, after a short
interval, the new control manifests. It is impossible to read many
of the accounts, whether one regards them as fictitious or not,
without getting an impression—like that given by a good
story-teller, if you please, of a life outside this one, among a
host of personalities who communicate freely with each other and,
through difficulties, with us. The nature of the communication we
have already tried to express by “interflow.” But all
metaphors are weak beside the impression of the Cosmic Soul that
has been brought to most of those who have persistently studied the
phenomena, as to nearly all those who have speculated a
priori on the nature of mind.

Judged by the foregoing specimens, the literature of what we are
provisionally considering as hypnotic telepathy would not be
regarded as very cheerful. As a whole, however, the pictures it
presents from an alleged postcarnate life, are cheerful, and some
of them very attractive.

Below are some from an alleged George Eliot. They are from notes
of Piper sittings kindly placed at our disposal by Professor
Newbold.

To my taste the matter savors very little of the
reputed author. And yet assuming for the moment that our great
authors survive in a fuller life, presumably they would have to
communicate under very embarrassing conditions: for not only would
they have to cramp themselves to produce work comprehensible here,
but the System of Things would have to limit them, lest their
competition should upset the whole system of our literary
development, or rather would have involved a different one from the
beginning.

My first reading of the alleged George Eliot matter inclined me
to scout it entirely. It is certainly not in all particulars what
that great soul would have sent from a better world if she had been
permitted to communicate [pg 169]anything more
profound than we have been left to find out for ourselves, or even
if she had had the commonplace chance to revise her manuscript. But
on reflection I realized that, although the matter came through
Mrs. Piper, it could not have come from her, wherever it
came from; and that if George Eliot were communicating tidings
naturally within our comprehension, and merely descriptive of
superficial experience as distinct from reflection, and were
communicating, through a poor telephone, words to be recorded by an
indifferent scribe, this material would not seem absolutely
incongruous with its alleged source, and to a reader knowing that
the stuff claimed to be hers, might possibly suggest the weakest
possible dilution or reflection of her. Yet in ways which I have no
space for, it abounds in the sort of anthropomorphism that might be
expected from the average medium or average sitter, but not from
George Eliot.

And now, since writing the last paragraph and going through the
material half a dozen times more, I have about concluded, or
perhaps worked myself up to the conclusion, that if a judicious
blue pencil were to take from it what could be attributed to
imperfect means of communication, and what could be considered as
having slopped over from the medium, there would be a pretty
substantial and not unbeautiful residuum which might, without
straining anything, be taken for a description by George Eliot, of
the heaven she would find if, as begins to seem possible, she and
the rest of us, have or are to have heavens to suit our respective
tastes. But what would have to be taken out is often ludicrously
incongruous with George Eliot, and taking it out would certainly be
open to serious question.

Yet whatever may be the qualities, merits, or demerits of this
“George Eliot” matter, what character it has is its
own, and different materially from any I have seen recorded from
any other control. What is vastly more important, despite the
lapses in knowledge, taste, and [pg 170]style, which
negative its being the unmodified production of George Eliot, it
nevertheless presents, me judice, the most reasonable,
suggestive, and attractive pictures of a life beyond bodily death
that I know of: it is not a reflection of previous mythologies, it
is congruous with the tastes of what we now consider rational
beings, and might well fill their desires; and it tallies with
our experiences—in dreams. Yet it is not a great feat of
imagination; but in recent times no great genius has attacked the
subject, and George Eliot would not have been expected to devote
her imagination to it, which raises a slight presumption that what
is told is really told by her from experience.

If I had to venture a guess as to how it came into existence, I
should guess that somebody within range, hardly Mrs. Piper herself,
had been reading George Eliot, or about George Eliot, and the
musk-melon pollen had affected the cucumbers. Professor Newbold,
for instance, was entirely able involuntarily to create and
telepath the stories, and better shaped ones. Some real George
Eliot influence may have flowed in too, but on that my judgment is
in suspense.

“George Eliot” comes in abruptly to Hodgson, on
February 26, 1897. After a few preliminaries, in response to a
remark of Hodgson’s on her dislike of and disbelief in
spiritism, she says:

This remark and the persistent efforts of the alleged G.P. who,
living, was a thorough skeptic, would seem strongly
“evidential.”

How much all this is like dreams!

The change of the instrument below is a specially dreamlike
touch.

She wanted to see Rembrandt, and he came, with a quantity of
pictures. She wanted a symphony, and an orchestra “of some
thirty musicians” at once appeared and gave her several,
which she enjoyed to the full.

Now George Eliot was a remarkably good musician. If she wanted
an orchestra, she would have wanted at least sixty, and probably
more than a hundred. Perhaps they do these things with more limited
resources in Heaven? Such an incongruity as this, and the inane
dilution of the writing (which of course does not appear at its
worst in the selected passages) make a genuine George Eliot control
hard to predicate, and yet this control, like virtually every other
one, is an individuality, and is less unlike [pg 173]George Eliot
than is any other control I know. Will difficulties of
communication or any other tertium quid, make up the
difference? I first read the record with repulsion, and now find in
it some elements of attraction.

Do you care for a little more? She wanted to see
“angels,” and gives a very pretty picture of an
experience with a bevy of children. Telepathy from the sitter will
hardly account for the following, especially the strange turn at
the end, which is signally dreamlike.

As bearing on her feeling for Lewes not many months after his
death, the foregoing does not correspond with some widely credited
but unpublished allegations.

Now does not all this read as if Mrs. Piper were dreaming of
George Eliot, just as any of us might dream? Its quality seems as
if it might be a transcript of one of my own dreams, with the
important exceptions that the dreamer wrote it all out, and that it
is made up from a [pg 174]series of dreams, coming up at intervals
for about six months, and apparently only when Hodgson was present,
though there are records of George Eliot appearing to other sitters
at other seances.

We have, then, groped our way to a vague notion of a dream-life
on the part of certain sensitives, which seems to participate in
another life, in some ways similar, that is led by intelligences
who have passed beyond the body.

We are not saying that this interpretation of the phenomena is
the correct one: on the contrary we are constantly haunted by a
suspicion that any day it may be exploded by some new discovery.
But we do say, with considerable confidence, that of all the
interpretations yet offered—even including the pervasive one
that “the little boy lied,” it surpasses all the others
in the portion of the facts that it fits, and in the weight
attached to it by the most capable students—even by James,
who, however, did not accept it as established, though he gave many
indications that he felt himself likely to. Myers definitely
accepted it, not from the impressions of the sensitives, but from
having them capped by a veridical impression of his own. Through
the church service one Sunday morning, he felt an inner voice
assuring him: “Your friend is still with you.” Later he
found that Gurney, with whom he had a manifestation-pact, had died
the night before. We are not aware that Myers ever published this,
but he told it to the present writer and presumably to others. The
convictions of Hodgson and Sir Oliver Lodge were interpretations of
the phenomena of the sensitives, though Hodgson, it is now known,
was probably mainly influenced by communications from the alleged
postcarnate soul of all possible ones most dear to him.

But to return to the sensitives. They seem to be somnambulists
who talk out and write out what they see and hear in their dreams.
What they see, and consequently [pg 175]what they say,
is a good deal of a jumble. They see and hear persons they never
saw before. Sometimes they identify themselves more or less with
these personalities. Mrs. Piper nearly always does. Those others
say many things, and very often correct things, unknown to
sensitives, to anybody present, or to anybody else that can be
found. Rather unusual among ordinary dreamers, but by no means
unprecedented. But from here on the experiences of the sensitives
are more and more unusual.

Some of the people Mrs. Piper (I speak of her as the
representative of a class) never saw before, and of whom she never
saw portraits, she identifies from photographs. Very few people
have done that: perhaps very few have had the chance. There have
been many times when I am sure I could, if photographs had been
presented.

Her personalities and those of many sensitives are nearly always
“dead” friends, not of the sensitives, but of the
sitters, and abound in indications of genuineness in scope and
accuracy of memory, in distinctness of individual recollections and
characteristics, and in all the dramatic indications that go to
demonstrate personalities. She sees and hears these personalities
again and again, and keeps them distinct in feature and
character.

Now what do we mean by personalities? Is one, after all,
anything more or less than an individualized aggregate of cosmic
vibrations, physical and psychical, with the power of producing on
us certain impressions. You and I know our friends as such
aggregates, and nothing more.

And what do we mean by discarnate personalities? In most minds,
the first answer will probably bear a pretty close resemblance to
Fra Angelico’s angels, and very nice angels they are! But to
some of the more prosy minds that have thought on the subject in
the light of the best and fullest information, or misinformation,
probably the answer will be more like this: A personality,
incarnate or postcarnate, in the last analysis, is a manifestation
of the Cosmic Soul. From that the raw material is supplied [pg
176]with the star dust, and later, through our senses, from
the earliest reactions of our protozoic ancestors, up to our
dreams; and the material is worked up into each personality through
reactions with the environment. Thus it becomes an aggregate of
capacities to impress another personality with certain sensations,
ideas, emotions. As already said, the incarnate personality
impresses us thru certain vibrations. But after that portion of the
vibrations constituting “the body” disappears, there
still abides somewhere the capacity of impressing us, at least in
the dream life. Perhaps it abides only in the memory of survivors,
and gets into our dreams telepathically, though that is losing
probability every day; and, with our anthropomorphic habits, we
want to know “where” this capacity to impress us
abides. The thinkers generally say: In the Cosmic reservoir, which
I would rather express as the psychic ocean, boundless, fathomless,
throbbing eternally. It seems to be made up of the original
mind-potential plus all thoughts and feelings that have ever been.
And into this ocean seem to be constantly passing those currents
that we know as individualities, that can each influence, and even
intermingle with, other individualities, here as well as there: for
here really is there. While each does this, it still retains its
own individuality. This is, of course, a vague string of guesses
venturing outward from the borderland of our knowledge. It may be a
little clearer, the more we bear in mind that the apparent
influencings and interminglings seem to be telepathic.

Now apparently among the accomplishments of a personality, does
not necessarily inhere that of depressing a scale x
pounds: for when that capacity is entirely absent, from the
apparent personalities who visit us in the dream state, they can
impress us in every other way, even to all the reciprocities of
sex. But for some reasons not yet understood, with ordinary
dreamers these impressions are not as congruous, persistent,
recurrent, or regulable in [pg 177]the dream life
as in the waking life. But with Mrs. Piper, Hodgson after his
death, and especially G.P. and others, were about as persistent and
consistent associates as anybody living, barring the fact that they
could not show themselves over an hour or two at a time, which was
the limit of the medium’s psychokinetic power, on which their
manifestations depended. But that these personalities are not in
time to be evolved so that they will be more permanent and
consistent with dreamers generally, would be a contradiction to at
least some of the implications of evolution.

Accepting provisionally the identity of a postcarnate life with
the life indicated in dreams, are there any further indications of
its nature? There are some, which may lend some slight confirmation
to the theory of identity.

It seems to show itself not only in the visions of the
sensitives, but in the dream life of all of us. If Mrs.
Piper’s dream state (I name her only as a type) is really one
of communication with souls who have passed into a new life, dream
states generally may not extravagantly be supposed to be foretastes
of that life. And so far as concerns their desirability, why should
they not be? Our ordinary dreams are, like the dreams of the
sensitives, superior to time, space, matter and force—to all
the trammels of our waking environment and powers. In dreams we
experience unlimited histories, and pass over unlimited spaces, in
an instant; see, hear, feel, touch, taste, smell, enjoy unlimited
things; walk, swim, fly, change things, with unlimited ease; do
things with unlimited power; make what we will—music, poetry,
objects of art, situations, dramas, with unlimited faculty, and
enjoy unlimited society. Unless we have eaten too much, or
otherwise got ourselves out of order in the waking life, in the
dream life we seldom if ever know what it is to be too late for
anything, or too far from anything; we freely fall from chimneys or
precipices, and I suppose it will soon be aeroplanes, [pg
178]with no worse consequences than comfortably waking up
into the everyday world; we sometimes solve the problems which
baffle us here; we see more beautiful things than we see here; and,
far above all, we resume the ties that are broken here.

The indications seem to be that if we ever get the hang of that
life, we can have pretty much what we like, and eliminate what we
don’t like—continue what we enjoy, and stop what we
suffer—find no bars to congeniality, or compulsion to
boredom. To good dreamers it is unnecessary to offer proof of any
of these assertions, and to prove them to others is impossible.

The dream life contains so much more beauty, so much fuller
emotion, and such wider reaches than the waking life, that one is
tempted to regard it as the real life, to which the waking life is
somehow a necessary preliminary. So orthodox believers regard the
life after death as the real life: yet most of their hopes
regarding that life—even the strongest hope of rejoining lost
loved ones—are realized here during the brief throbs of the
dream life.

There seems to be no happiness from association in our ordinary
life which is not obtainable, by some people at least, from
association in the dream life. And as this appears to exist between
incarnate A and postcarnate B, there is at least a suggestion that
it may exist between postcarnate A and postcarnate B, and to a
degree vastly more clear and abiding than during the present
discrepancy between the incarnate and postcarnate conditions? This
of course assumes, that B’s appearance in A’s dream
life, just as he appeared on earth (though, as I know to be the
case, sometimes wiser, healthier, jollier, and more lovable
generally), is something more than a mild attack of dyspepsia on
the part of A.

Dreams do not seem to abound in work, and are often said not to
abound in morality, but I know that they sometimes do—in
morality higher than any attainable in our waking life. Certainly
the scant vague indications [pg 179]from the dream
suggestions of a future life do not necessarily preclude abundant
work and morality, any more than work and sundry self-denials are
precluded on a holiday because one does not happen to perform them.
Moreover, the hoped-for future conditions may not contain the
necessities for either labor or self-restraint that present
conditions do: they may not be the same dangers there as here in
the dolce far niente, or in Platonic friendships.

Men are not consistent in their attitude regarding dreams. They
admit the dream state to be ideal—constantly use such
expressions as “A dream of loveliness,” “Happier
than I could even dream,” “Surpasses my fondest
dreams,” and yet on the other hand they call its experience
“but the baseless vision of a dream.” What do they mean
by “baseless”? Certainly it is not lack of vividness or
emotional intensity. It is probably the lack of duration in the
happy experiences, and of the possibility of remembering them, and,
still more, of enjoying similar ones at will. Yet the sensitives do
both in recurrent instalments of the dream life, and like the rest
of us, through the intervening waking periods, after the first hour
or so, generally know nothing of the dreams. It is not vividness of
the dream life itself that is lacking, but vividness in our
memories of it. James defines our waking personality as the stream
of consciousness: the dream life gives no such stream. To-night
does not continue last night as to-day continues yesterday. The
dream life is not like a stream, but more like a series, though
hardly integral enough to be a series, of disconnected pools, many
of them perhaps more enchanting than any parts of the waking
stream, but not, like that stream, an organic whole with motion
toward definite results, and power to attain them. But suppose the
dream life continues after the body’s death, and under
direction toward definite ends, at least so far as the waking life
is, and still free from the trammels [pg 180]of the waking
life—suppose us to have at least as much power to secure its
joys and avoid its terrors as we have regarding those of the waking
life; and with all the old intimacies which it spasmodically
restores, restored permanently, and with the discipline of
separation to make them nearer perfect. What more can we manage to
want?

The suggestion has come to more than one student, that when we
enter into life—as spermatozoa, or star dust if you
please—we enter into the eternal life, but that the physical
conditions essential to our development into appreciating it, are a
sort of veil between it and our consciousness. In our waking life
we know it only through the veil; but when in sleep or trance, the
material environment is removed from consciousness, the veil
becomes that much thinner, and we get better glimpses of the
transcendent reality.

Does it not seem then as if, in dreams, we enter upon our closer
relation with the hyper-phenomenal mind? All sorts of things seem
to be in it, from the veriest trifles and absurdities up to the
highest things our minds can receive, and presumably an infinity of
things higher still. They appear to flow into us in all sorts of
ways, presumably depending upon the condition of the nerve
apparatus through which they flow. If that is out of gear from any
disorder or injury, what it receives is not only trifling, but
often grotesque and painful; while if it is in good estate, it
often receives things far surpassing in beauty and wisdom those of
our waking phenomenal world.

Apparently every dreamer is a medium for this flow, but dreamers
vary immensely in their capacity to receive it—from Hodge,
who dreams only when he has eaten too much, or Professor Gradgrind
who never dreams at all, up to Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Piper.

As oft remarked, dreams generally are nonsense, but some dreams,
or parts of some dreams, are perhaps the most significant things we
know. Each vision, waking or sleeping, must have a cause, and as an
expression of that [pg 181]cause, must be
veridical. On the one hand, the cause of a trivial dream is
generally too trivial to be ascertained: it may be too much
lobster, or impaired circulation or respiration; while on the other
hand (and here the paradox seems to be explained), the cause of an
important dream must, ex vi termini, be some important
event. But important events are rare, and therefore significant
dreams are rare; while trivial events are frequent, and therefore
trivial dreams are frequent.

The important and rare event may be such a conjunction
of circumstances and temperaments as makes it possible for a
postcarnate intelligence, assuming the existence of such, to
communicate with an incarnate one. That such apparent
communications are rare tends to indicate their genuineness.

Now to develop a little farther the time-honored hypothesis of a
cosmic soul as explaining dreams, and supported by them.

Admit, provisionally at least, that the medium is merely an
extraordinary dreamer. Does a man do his own dreaming, or is it
done for him? Does a man do his own digesting, circulating,
assimilating, or is it done for him? If he does not do these things
himself, who does? About the physical functions through the
sympathetic nerve, we answer unhesitatingly: the cosmic force. How,
then, about the psychic functions? Are they done by the cosmic
psyche?

Like respiration, they are partly under our control, but that
does not affect the problem. Who runs them when we do not run them,
even when we try to stop them that we may get to sleep? Even when,
after they have yielded to our entreaties to stop, and we are
asleep, they begin going again—without our will. The only
probability I can make out is that our thinking is run by a power
not ourselves, as much as our other partly involuntary
functions.

[pg
182]To hold that a man does his own dreaming—that it
is done by a secondary layer of his own consciousness—is to
hold that we are made up of layers of consciousness, of which the
poorest layer is that of what we call our waking life, and the
better layers are at our service only in our dreams—that when
a man is asleep or mad he can solve problems, compose music, create
pictures, to which, when awake and in his sober senses, and in a
condition to profit by his work, and give profit from it, he is
inadequate.

Nay more, the theory claims that a man’s working
consciousness—his self—the only self known to him or
the world, will hold and shape his life by a set of convictions
which, in sleep, he will himself prove wrong, and thereby
revolutionize his philosophy and his entire life. Wouldn’t it
be more reasonable to attribute all such results—the
solutions of the problems, the music, the pictures, the corrections
of the errors—to a power outside himself?

I cannot believe that there’s anything in my individual
consciousness which my experience or that of my ancestors has not
placed there—in raw material at least; or that in working up
that raw material I can exert any genius in my sometimes
chaotic dreams that I cannot exert in my systematized waking hours.
All the people I meet and talk with in my dreams may have
been met and talked with by me or my forebears, though I
don’t believe it; but the works of art I see have not been
known to me or my ancestors or any other mortal; nor have I any
sign of the genius to combine whatever elements of them I may have
seen, into any such designs. And when in dreams other
persons tell me things contrary to my firmest convictions, in which
things I later discover germs of most important workable truth, the
persons who tell me that, and who are different from me as far as
fairly decent persons can differ from each other, are certainly
not, as the good Du Prel would have us believe, myself. All these
things are [pg 183]not figments of my mind—if
they are figments of a mind, it’s a mind bigger than mine.
The biggest claim I can make, or assent to anybody else making, is
that my mind is telepathically receptive of the product of that
greater mind.

Here are some farther evidences of the greater mind, given by
Lombroso (After Death, What?, 320f.):

It is a quite frequent experience that a person perplexed by a
problem at night finds it solved on waking in the morning. Efforts
to remember, which are unsuccessful before going to sleep, on
waking are often found accomplished.

[pg
184]A dream is a work of genius, and in many respects,
perhaps most, especially in vividness of imagination, the best
example we have. It is the most spontaneous, constructed with the
least effort from fewest materials, the least restrained, and often
immeasurably surpassing all works of waking genius in the same
department. A genius gets a trifling hint, and being inspired by
the gods (anthropomorphic for: flowed in upon by the cosmic soul?)
builds out of the hint a poem or a drama or a symphony. You and I
build dreams surpassing the poem or the drama or the symphony, but
our friends Dryasdust and Myopia inquire into our experiences, and
sometimes find a little hint on which a dream was built, and then
all dreams are demonstrated things unworthy of serious
consideration. Is it not a more rational view that the fact that
the soul can in the dream state elaborate so much from so little,
indicates it to be then already in a life which has no limits?

Havelock Ellis, in his World of Dreams, says (p.
229):

He puts “the horse” outside of the dreamer plainly
enough here. He further says (p. 280).

He quotes from Bergson (Revue Philosophique, December,
1908, p. 574):

Ellis continues (p. 281):

But with the exception of a few spasmodic inspirations, the
records of dreams, ordinary or from the sensitives, contain nothing
new—nothing to relieve man from the blessed necessity of
eating his bread, intellectual as well as material, in the sweat of
his brow; and, perhaps more important still, little to make the
interests or responsibilities of this life weaker because of any
realized inferiority to those of a possible later life.

It would apparently be inconsistent in Nature, or God, if you
prefer, to start our evolution under earthly conditions, educating
us in knowledge and character through labor and suffering, but at
the same time throwing open to our perceptions, from another life,
a wider range of knowledge and character attainable without labor
or suffering.

I have no time or space or inclination to argue with those who
deny a plan in Nature. He who does, probably lives away from
Nature. It appears to have been a part of that plan that for a long
time past most of us should “believe in” immortality,
and that, at least until very lately, none of us should know
anything about it. Confidence in immortality has been a dangerous
thing. So far we haven’t all made a very good use of it. Many
of the people who have had most of it and busied themselves most
with it, so to speak, have largely transferred their interests to
the other life, and neglected and abused this one.
“Other-worldliness” is a well-named vice, and positive
evidence of immortality might be more dangerous than mere
confidence in it.

[pg
186]All this, I think, supports the notion that whatever, if
anything, is in store for us beyond this life, it would be a
self-destructive scheme of things (or Scheme of Things, if you
prefer) that would throw the future life into farther competition
with our interests here, at least before we are farther evolved
here. Looking at history by and large, we children have not
generally been trusted with edge tools until we had grown to some
sort of capacity to handle them. If the Mesopotamians or Egyptians
or Greeks or Romans had had gunpowder, it looks as if they would
have blown most of themselves and each other out of existence, and
the rest back into primitive savagery, and stayed there until the
use of gunpowder became one of the lost arts. But the new knowledge
of evolution has given the modern world a new intellectual
interest; and the new altruism, a new moral one. The reasons for
doing one’s best in this life, and doing it actively, are so
much stronger and clearer than they were when so many good people
could fall into asceticism and other-worldliness, that perhaps we
are now fit to be trusted with proofs of an after life. It is very
suggestive that these apparent proofs came contemporaneously with
the new knowledge tending to make them safe; and equally suggestive
that it is when we have begun to suffer from certain breakdowns in
religion, that we have been provided with new material for bracing
it up.

At the opposite extreme, it also is suggestive that these new
indications that our present life is a petty thing beside a future
one, have come just when modern science has so increased our
control over material nature that we are in peculiar danger of
having our interest in higher things buried beneath material
interests, and enervated by over-indulgence in material
delights.

If it be true that, roughly speaking, we are not entrusted with
dangerous things before we are evolved to the point where we can
keep their danger within bounds, the fact that we have not until
very lately, if yet, been entrusted [pg 187]with any
verification of the dream of the survival of bodily death, would
seem to confer upon the spiritistic interpretation of the recent
apparent verifications, a pragmatic sanction—an accidental
embryo pun over which the historic student is welcome to a smile,
and which, since the preceding clause was written, I have seen used
in all seriousness by Professor Giddings. Conclusive or not, that
“sanction” is certainly an addition to the arguments
that existed before, including the general argument from evolution.
And, so far as the phenomena go to establish the spiritistic
hypothesis, surely they are not to be lightly regarded because as
yet they do not establish it more conclusively.

When during the last century science bowled down the old
supports of the belief in immortality, there grew up a tendency to
regard that belief as an evidence of ignorance, narrowness, and
incapacity to face the music. May not disregard of the possible new
supports be rapidly becoming an evidence of the same
characteristics?

When the majority of those who have really studied the phenomena
of the sensitives, starting with absolute skepticism, have come to
a new form of the old belief; and when, of the remaining minority,
the weight of respectable opinion goes so far as suspense of
judgment, how does the argument look? Isn’t it at least one
of those cases of new phenomena where it is well to be on guard
against old mental habits, not to say prejudices?

Is it not now vastly more reasonable to believe in a
future life than it was a century ago, or half a century, or
quarter of a century? Is it not already more reasonable to believe
in it than not to believe in it? Is it not already appreciably
harder not to believe in it than it was a generation
ago?

So far as I can see, the dream life, from mine up to Mrs.
Piper’s, vague as it is, is an argument for immortality
based on evidence.

[pg
188]The sensitives are not among the world’s leading
thinkers or moralists—are not more aristocratic founders for
a new faith than were a certain carpenter’s son and certain
fishermen; and only by implication do the sensitives suggest any
moral truths, but they do offer more facts to the modern demand for
facts.

Spiritism has a bad name, and it has been in company where it
richly deserved one; but it has been coming into court lately with
some very important-looking testimony from very distinguished
witnesses; and some rather comprehensive minds consider its issues
supreme—the principal issues now upon the horizon, between
the gross, luxurious, unthinking, unaspiring, uncreating life of
today, and everything that has, in happier ages, given us the
heritage of the soul—the issues between increasing comforts
and withering ideals—between water-power and Niagara.

The doubt of immortality is not over the innate reasonableness
of it: the universe is immeasurably more reasonable with it than
without it; but over its practicability after the body is gone. We,
in our immeasurable wisdom, don’t see how it can
work—we don’t see how a universe that we don’t
begin to know, which already has given us genius and beauty and
love, and which seems to like to give us all it can—birds,
flowers, sunsets, stars, Vermont, the Himalayas, and the Grand
Canyon; which, most of all, has given us the insatiable soul, can
manage to give us immortality. Well! Perhaps we ought not to be
grasping—ought to call all we know and have, enough, and be
thankful—thankful above all, perhaps, that as far as we can
see, the hope of immortality cannot be disappointed—that the
worst answer to it must be oblivion. But on whatever grounds we
despair of more (if we are weak enough to despair), surely the
least reasonable ground is that we cannot see more: the mole might
as well swear that there is no Orion.

[pg
189]

The Muses on the Hearth

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Contents

“How to be efficient though incompetent” is the
title suggested by a distinguished psychologist for the vocational
appeals of the moment. Among these raucous calls none is more
annoying to the ear of experience than the one which summons the
college girl away from the bounty of the sciences and the
humanities to the grudging concreteness of a domestic science, a
household economy, from which stars and sonnets must perforce be
excluded. We have, indeed, no quarrel with the conspicuous place
now given to the word “home” in all discussions of
women’s vocations. Suffragists and anti-suffragists,
feminists and anti-feminists have united to clear a noble term from
the mists of sentimentality and to reinstate it in the vocabulary
of sincere and candid speakers. More frankly than a quarter of a
century ago, educated women may now glory in the work allotted to
their sex. The most radical feminist writer of the day has given
perfect expression to the home’s demand. Husband and
children, she says, have been able to count on a woman “as
they could count on the fire on the hearth, the cool shade under
the tree, the water in the well, the bread in the sacrament.”
We may go farther and say that our high emprise does not depend
upon husband and children. Married or unmarried, fruitful or
barren, with a vocation or without, we must make of the world a
home for the race. So far from quarrelling with the hypothesis of
the domestic scientists, we turn it into a confession of faith. It
is their conclusions that will not bear the test of experience.
Because women students can anticipate no more important career than
home-making, it is argued that within their four undergraduate
years training should be given in the practical [pg 190]details of
house-keeping. Any woman who has been both a student and a
housekeeper knows that this argument is fallacious.

Before examining it, however, we must clear away possible
misunderstandings. Our discussion concerns colleges and not
elementary schools. Those who are loudest in denouncing the
aristocratic theory of a college education must admit that colleges
contain, even today, incredible as it sometimes seems, a selected
group of young women. It is also true that the High Schools contain
selected groups. Below them are the people’s schools. The
girls who do not go beyond these are to be the wives of working
men, in many cases can learn nothing from their mothers, and before
marriage may themselves be caught in the treadmill of daily labor.
It is probable that to these children of impoverished future we
should give the chance to learn in school facts which may make
directly for national health and well-being. But the girls in the
most democratic state university in this country are selected by
their own ambition, if by nothing else, for a higher level of life.
Their power and their opportunities to learn do not end on
Commencement Day. The higher we go in the scale of education, until
we reach the graduate professional schools, the less are we able
and the less need we be concerned to anticipate the specific
activities of the future.

Furthermore, we are discussing colleges of “liberal”
studies, not technical schools. Into the former have strayed many
students who belong in the latter. The tragic thing about their
errantry is that presidents and faculties, instead of setting them
in the right path, try to make the college over to suit them. The
rightful heirs to the knowledge of the ages are despoiled. The most
down-trodden students are those who cherish a passion for the
intellectual life. Among these are as many women as men. If
domestic science were confined to separate schools, as all applied
sciences ought to be, we should have nothing but praise for a
subject admirably conceived, and [pg 191]often admirably
taught. In these schools it may be studied by such High School
graduates as prefer to deal with practical rather than with pure
science, and, in a larger way, by such college graduates as wish to
supplement theory with practice for professional purposes. But in
liberal colleges domestic science is but dross handed out to
seekers after gold. Against its intrusion into the curriculum no
protest can be too stern.

Faith in this study seems to rest upon the belief that the
actual experiences of life can be anticipated. This is a fallacy.
There is no dress rehearsal for the rôle of “wife and
mother.” It is a question of experience piled on experience,
life piled on life. The only way to perform the tasks, understand
the duties, accept the joys and sorrows of any given stage of
existence is to have performed the tasks, learned the duties,
fought out the joys and sorrows of earlier stages. In so far as
“housekeeping” means the application of principles of
nutrition and sanitation, these principles can be acquired at the
proper time by an active, well-trained mind. The preparation needed
is not to have learned facts three or five or ten years in advance,
when theories and appliances may have been very different, but to
have taken up one subject after another, finding how to master
principles and details. This new subject is not recondite nor are
we unconquerably stupid. To learn as we go—discere
ambulando—need not turn the home into an experiment
station.

But “every woman knows” that housekeeping, when it
is a labor of love and not a paid profession, goes far deeper than
ordering meals or keeping refrigerators clean, or making an
invalid’s bed with hospital precision. We are more than
cooks. We furnish power for the day’s work of men, and for
the growth of children’s souls. We are more than parlor
maids. We are artists, informing material objects with a living
spirit. We are more even than trained nurses. We are companions
along the roads of pain, comrades, it may be, at the gates of
death. Back [pg 192]of our willingness to do our full work must
lie something profounder than lectures on bacteria, or interior
decoration, or an invalid’s diet or a baby’s bath.
Specific knowledge can be obtained in a hurry by a trained student.
What cannot be obtained by any sudden action of the mind is the
habit of projecting a task against the background of human
experience as that experience has been revealed in history and
literature, and of throwing into details the enthusiasm born of
this larger vision. She is fortunate who comes to the task of
making a home with this habit already formed. Her student life may
have cast no shadow of the future. When she was reading
Æschylus or Berkeley, or writing reports on the Italian
despots, or counting the segments of a beetle’s
antennæ, she may not have foreseen the hours when the manner
of life and the manner of death of human beings would depend upon
her. She was merely sanely absorbed in the tasks of her present.
But in later life she comes to see that in performing them, she
learned to disentangle the momentary from the permanent, to prefer
courage to cowardice, to pay the price of hard work for values
received. Age may bring what youth withholds, a sense of humor, a
mellow sympathy. But only youth can begin that habitual discipline
of mind and will which is the root, if not of all success, at least
of that which blooms in the comfort of other people. Carry the
logic of the vocation-mongers to its extreme. Grant that every girl
in college ought someday to marry, and that we must train her,
while we have her, for this profession. Then let the college insist
on honest work, clear thinking and bright imagination in those
great fields in which successive generations reap their
intellectual harvest. Captain Rostron of the Carpathia once spoke
to a body of college students who were on fire with enthusiasm for
the rescuer of the Titanic’s survivors. He ended with some
such words as these: “Go back to your classes and work hard.
I scarcely knew that night what orders were coming out when I
opened my [pg 193]mouth to speak, but I can tell you that I
had been preparing to give those orders ever since I was a boy in
school.” Many a home may be saved from shipwreck in the
future because today girls are doing their duty in their Greek
class rooms and Physics laboratories.

But this fallacy of domesticity probes deeper than we have yet
indicated. It is, in the last analysis, superficial to ticket
ourselves off as house-keepers or even as women. What are these
unplumbed wastes between housekeepers and teachers, mothers and
scholars, civil engineers and professors of Greek, senators and
journalists, bankers and poets, men and women? A philosopher has
pointed out that what we share is vastly greater than what
separates us. We walk upon and must know the same earth. We live
under the same sun and stars. In our bodies we are subject to the
same laws of physics, biology and chemistry. We speak the same
language, and must shape it to our use. We are products of the same
past, and must understand it in order to understand the present. We
are vexed by the same questions about Good and Evil, Will and
Destiny. We all bury our dead. We shall all die ourselves. Back of
our vocations lies human life. Back of the streams in which we
dabble is that immortal sea which brought us hither. To sport upon
its shore and hear the roll of its mighty waters is the divine
privilege of youth.

If any difference is to be made in the education of boys and
girls, it must be with the purpose of giving to future women more
that is “unvocational,” “unapplied,”
“unpractical.” As it happens, such studies as these are
the ones which the mother of a family, as well as a teacher or
writer, is most sure to apply practically in her vocation. The last
word on this aspect of the subject was said by a woman in a small
Maine town. Her father had been a day laborer, her husband was a
mechanic. She had five children, and, of course, did all the
house-work. She also belonged to a club which studied French
history. To a foolish expression of surprise that with all her
little children [pg 194]she could find time to write a paper on
Louis XVI she retorted angrily: “With all my children! It is
for my children that I do it. I do not mean that they shall have to
go out of their home, as I have had to, for everything
interesting.” But the larger truth is that the value of a
woman as a mother depends precisely upon her value as a human
being. And it is for that reason that in her youth we must lead one
who is truly thirsty only to fountains pouring from the
heaven’s brink. It might seem cruel if it did not merely
illustrate the law of risk involved in any creative process, that
the more generously women fulfil the “function of their
sex” the more they are in danger of losing their souls to
furnish a mess of pottage. The risk of life for life at a
child’s birth is more dramatic but no truer than the risk of
soul for body as the child grows. In the midst of petty household
cares the nervous system may become a master instead of a servant,
a breeder of distempers rather than a feeder of the imagination.
The unhappiness of homes, the failure of marriage, are due as often
to the poverty-stricken minds, the narrowed vision of women as to
the vice of men.

George Meredith’s prayer for us, “more brain, O
Lord, more brain!” we shall still need when “votes for
women” has become an outworn slogan.

No one claims that character is produced only by college
training or any other form of education. There are illiterate women
whose wills are so steady, whose hearts are so generous, and whose
spirits seem to be so continuously refreshed that we look up to
them with reverence. They have their own fountains. It would be a
mistake to suppose that because they are “open at the
outlet” they are “closed at the reservoir.” But
there is a class of women who are impelled toward knowledge (as
still others are impelled toward music or art) and whose success in
anything [pg 195]they do will depend upon their state of
mind. We ought to assume that the girls who go to college belong to
this class, however far from the springs of Helicon they mean to
march in the future. It is a terrible thing that we should think of
taking one hour of their time while they are in college for any
course that does not enrich the intellect and add to the treasury
of thoughts and ideas upon which the woman with a mind will always
be drawing. Spirit is greater than intellect, and may survive it in
the course of a long life. But in the active years, for this kind
of woman, the mental life becomes one with the spiritual. A lusty
serviceableness will issue from their union. If mental interests
seem sterile, the cure, as far as the college is concerned with it,
is to deepen, not to lessen the love of learning. The renewal of
sincerity, humility and enthusiasm in the age-old search for truth
is more necessary than the introduction of new courses, which must
be applied to be of value, and which at this time in a girl’s
experience, and under these conditions, can give only partial and
superficial data.

Our lives are subject to a thousand changes. In the home as well
as out of it, we shall meet, face to face, fruition and
disappointment, rapture and pain, hope and despair. In these tests
of the soul’s health what good will domestic science
do us? Not by sanitation is sanity brought forth. Women do not
gather courage from calories, nor faith from refrigerators. But
every added milestone along the road from youth to age shows us the
truth of Cicero’s claim, made after he had borne public care
and known private grief, for the faithful, homely companionship of
intellectual studies: “For other things belong neither to all
times and ages nor all places; but these pursuits feed our growing
years, bring charm to ripened age, adorn prosperity, offer a refuge
and solace to adversity, delight us at home, do not handicap us
abroad, abide with us through the watches of the night, go with us
on our travels, make holiday with us in the country.”

[pg
196]Upon women, in crucial hours, may depend the peace of
the old, the fortune of the middle-aged, the hopefulness of the
young. In such an hour we do not wish to be dismissed as were the
women of Socrates’s family, who had had no part in the bright
life of the Athens of which he was taking leave. Shall we become
the bread in the sacrament of life, ourselves unfed? the fire on
the hearth, ourselves unkindled?

[pg
197]

The Land of the Sleepless
Watchdog

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Contents

If from almost any given point in the United States you start
out towards the Southwest, you will reach in time the Land of the
Sleepless Watchdog. On each of the scattered farms, defending it
against all intruders, you will find a band of eager and vociferous
dogs—dogs who magnify their calling because they have no
other, and who, by the same token lose all sense of proportion in
life. It is “theirs not to reason why,” but to put up
warnings and threats, and to be ready for the fight that never
comes.

If you enter a domain without previous understanding with them,
you are powerless for mischief, for you are in the center of a
publicity beside which any other publicity is that of a
hermit’s cell. The whole farm knows where you are, and all
are suspicious of your predatory intentions. You can have none
under these conditions. Meanwhile the whole pack voices its opinion
of you and your unworthiness.

This is supposing that you are actually there. If you are not,
it amounts to the same thing. Every dog knows that you meant to be
there, or at any rate, that to be there was the scheme of someone
equally bad. The slightest rustle of the wind, the call of a bird,
the ejaculation responsive to a flea—any of these, anything
to set the pack going.

And one pack starts the next. And the cries of the two start the
third and the fourth, and each of these reacts on the first. The
cry passes along the line, “We have him at last, the mad
invader.” There being no other enemy, they cry out against
each other. And of late [pg 198]years, since the
barbed wire choked the cattle ranges, and gave pause to the coyote,
there has been no enemy. But the dogs are there, though their
function has passed away. It is but a tradition—a
remembrance. Only to the dogs themselves does any reality
exist.

Yet, such is the nature of dogs and men, the watchdog was never
more numerous nor more alert than today. He was never in better
voice, and having nothing whatever to do, he does it to the highest
artistic perfection. At least one justification remains.
Civilization has not done away with the moon. In the stillness of
night, its great white face peeps over the hills at intervals no
dog has yet determined. Under this weird light, strange shadowy
forms trip across the fields. The watchdogs of each farm have given
warning, and the whole countryside is eager with vociferation.

Men say the Sleepless Watchdog’s bark is worse than his
bite. This may be, but it is certain that his feed is worse than
both bark and bite together. In the language of economics, the
Sleepless Watchdog is an unremunerative investment. He has
“eaten his master out of house and home,” and by the
same token, he imagines that he himself is now the master.

By this time, the gentle but astute reader has observed that
this is no common “Dog Story,” but a parable of the
times we live in; and that the real name of the Land of the
Sleepless (but unremunerative) Watchdog is indeed Europe.

And because of the noisy and costly futility of the whole system
in his own and other countries, Professor Ottfried Nippold of
Frankfort-on-the-Main, has made a special study of the Watchdogs of
Germany.

The good people of the Fatherland some forty years ago were
drawn into a great struggle with their neighbors beyond the Rhine.
To divert his subjects’ attention from their ills at home,
the Emperor of France wagered his [pg 199]Rhine provinces
against those of Prussia, in the game of War. The Emperor lost, and
the King of Prussia took the stakes: for in those days it was a
divine right of Kings to deal in flesh and blood.

The play is finished, the board is cleared, Alsace and Lorraine
were added to Germany, and the mistake is irretrievable. A fact
accomplished cannot be blotted out. But hopeless as it all is,
there are watchdogs who, on moonlight nights, call across the
Vosges for revenge—for honor, for War, War, War. And the
German watchdogs cry War, War, War. The word sounds the same in all
languages. The watchdogs bark, but the battle will never begin.

It is Professor Nippold’s purpose, in his little book
Der Deutsche Chauvinismus, to show that the clamor is not
all on one side. The watchdogs of the Paris Boulevards are noisy
enough, but those of Berlin are just the same. And as these are not
all of Germany, so the others are not all of France. A great,
thrifty, honest, earnest, cultured nation does not find its voice
in the noises of the street. On the other hand, Germany,
industrious, learned, profound and brave, is busy with her own
affairs. She would harm no one, but mind her own business. But she
is entangled in mediæval fashions. She has her own band of
watchdogs, as noisy, as futile, as unthinkingly clamorous as ever
were those of France. The “Sleepless Watchdog” in
France is known as a Chauvinist, in England as a Jingo, in Prussia
as a Pangermanist. They all bay at the same moon, are excited over
the same fancies; they hear nothing, see nothing but one another.
All alike live in an unreal world, in its essentials a world of
their own creation. With all of them the bark is worse than the
bite, and their “Keep” is more disastrous than both
together.

And as each nation should look after its own, Dr. Nippold
lists—blacklists if you choose—the Chauvinists of
Germany.

[pg
200]At first glance, they make an imposing showing. A long
series of newspapers, dozens of pamphlets, categories of bold and
impressive warnings against the schemes of England and France, a
set of appeals in the name of patriotism, of religion, of force, of
violence. A long-drawn call to hate, to hate whatever is not of our
own race or class; and above all the banding together of the
“noblest” profession as against the encroachments of
mere civilians, of men whose hands are soiled with other stains
than blood.

We have, first and foremost, General Keim, Keim the invincible,
Keim the insatiable, Keim of the Army-League, Keim the arch hater
of England and of Russia and of France, Keim the jewel of the
fighting Junker aristocracy of Prussia—the band of warriors
who despise all common soldiers—“white slave”
conscripts, and with them all civilians, who at the best are only
potential common soldiers. “War, war, on both
frontiers,” is Keim’s obsessing vision. War being
inevitable and salutary, it cannot come too soon. The duty of hate,
he urges on all the youth of Germany, maidens as well as men. It is
said that Keim is the only man of the day who can maintain before
an audience of Christians such a proposition as this: “We
must learn to hate, and to hate with method. A man counts little
who cannot hate to a purpose. Bismarck was hate.”

From Gaston Choisy’s clever character sketch of General
Keim, we learn that as a soldier or tactician, he was a man of no
note. He has no ability as a thinker or as a speaker, but this he
has: “the courage of his vulgarity.” “At the age
of 68, suffering from Bright’s Disease, he travelled all
Germany, his great head always in ebullition, gathering everywhere
for the war-fire all the news, all the stories and all the lies
susceptible of aiding the Cause.” “Without
Bismarck’s authority, he had his manner—a mixture of
baseness, of atrocious joviality, a studied cynicism and a lack of
conscience.” “How generous are [pg 201]circumstances!
The spirit of Von Moltke the silent, with the speech of an
enfant terrible, an endless flow of language, an endless
course of words.”

To the Chauvinists of France, Keim is indeed Germany. As to his
own country, Von Ferlach sagely remarks: “Keims and Keimlings
unfortunately are all about us. But they are a vanishing
minority.” The great culture peoples do not hate one another.
(“Die grossen Kultur-volker hassen einander
nicht.”)

Next on the black list, comes General Frederick von Bernhardi,
with his Germany and the Next War, the need to obliterate
France, while giving the needed chastisement to England. A retired
officer of cavalry, said to be disgruntled through failure of
promotion, a tall, spare, serious, prosy figure, a writer without
inspiration, a speaker without force. Germany has never taken him
seriously; for he lacks even the clown-charm of his rival Keim, but
the mediæval absurdities and serious extravagances in his
defense of war are well tempered to stir the eager watchdogs in the
rival lands. In spite of his pleas, “historical, biological
and philosophical,” for war, he is a man of peace, for which,
in the words of General Eichhorn, “one’s own sword is
the best and strongest pledge.”

Doubtless other retired officers hold views of the same sort, as
do doubtless many who could not be retired too soon for the welfare
of Germany. Into the nature of their patriotism, the Zabern
incident has thrown a great light. “Other lands may possess
an army,” a Prussian officer is quoted as saying, “the
army possesses Germany.”

The vanities and follies of Prussian militarism are concentrated
in the movement called Pangermanism. Behind this, there seem to be
two moving forces, the Prussian Junker aristocracy, and the
financial interests which center about the house of Krupp. The
purposes of Pangermanism seem to be, on the one hand, to prevent
parliamentary government in Germany; and on the other, to take part
in whatever goes on in the world outside. [pg 202]Just now, the
control of Constantinople is the richest prize in sight, and that
fateful city is fast replacing Alsace in the passive role of
“the nightmare of Europe.” The journalists called
Conservative find that “Germany needs a vigorous diplomacy as
a supplement to her power on land and sea, if she is to exercise
the influence she deserves.” And a vigorous foreign policy is
but another name for the use of the War System as a means of
pushing business. From the daily press of Germany may be culled
many choice examples of idle Jingo talk, but analysis of the papers
containing it shows their affiliation with the “extreme
right,” a small minority in German politics, potent only
through the indiscretions of the Crown Prince, and through the fact
that the Constitution of Germany gives its people no control over
administrative affairs. The journals of this sort—the
Tägliche Rundschau, the Berliner Post, the
Deutsche Tageszeitung, and the Berliner Neueste
Nachrichten are the property of Junker reactionists, or else,
like the Lokal Anzeiger, the Rheinisch-Westphalische
Zeitung, the organs merely of the War trade House of Krupp.
Out from the ruck of hack writers, there stands a single imposing
figure, Maximilian Harden, the “poet of German
politics,” who “casts forth heroic gestures and thinks
of politics in terms of æsthetics, the prophet of a great,
strong and saber-rattling nation,” whose force shall be felt
everywhere under the sun.

Bloodthirsty pamphlets in numbers, are listed by Nippold. But
the anonymous writers (“Divinator,”
“Rhenanus,” “Lookout,”
“Deutscher,” “Politiker,” “Activer
General” and “Deutscher Officier”) count for less
than nothing in personal influence. They do little more than bay at
the moon.

Impressive as Nippold’s list seems at first, and dangerous
to the peace of the world, after all one’s final thought is
this: How few they are, and how scant their influence, as compared
with the wise, sane, commonsense of sixty millions of German
people. The two great papers that [pg 203]stand for peace
and sanity, the Berliner Tageblatt and the Frankfurter
Zeitung, with the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten,
are read daily by more Germans than all the reactionary sheets
combined. The Socialist organ Vorwaerts, avowedly opposed
to monarchy as well as to militarism, carries farther than all the
organs of Pangermanism of whatever kind.

We may justly conclude that the war spirit is not the spirit of
Germany, a nation perforce military because the people cannot help
themselves. So far as it goes, it is the spirit of a narrow clique
of “sleepless watchdogs” whose influence is waning, and
would be non-existent were it not for the military organization
which holds Germany by the throat, but which has pushed the German
people just as far as it dares.

A second lesson is that while forms of government, and social
traditions, may differ, the relation of public opinion towards war
is practically the same in all the countries of Western Europe. It
is in its way the test of European civilization. Each nation has
its “sleepless watchdogs,” and those of one nation fire
the others, when the proper war scares are set in motion by the
great unscrupulous group of those who profit by them. The war
promoters, the apostles of hate, form a brotherhood among
themselves, and their success in frightening one nation reacts to
make it easier to scare another.

This the reader may remember, as a final lesson. There is no
civilized nation which longs for war. There is nowhere a reckless
populace clamoring for blood. The schools have done away with all
that. The spread of commerce has brought a new Earth with new
sympathies and new relations, in which international war has no
place.

If you are sure that your own nation has no design to use
violence on any other, you may be equally sure that no other has
evil designs on you. The German fleet is not built as a menace to
England; whether it be large or small should concern England very
little. Just as little does the [pg 204]size of the
British fleet bear any concern to Germany. The German fleet is
built against the German people. The growth of the British army and
navy has in part the same motive. Armies and navies hold back the
waves of populism and democracy. They seem a bulwark against
Socialism. But in the great manufacturing and commercial nations,
they will not be used for war, because they cannot be. The
sacrifice appalls: the wreck of society would be beyond
computation.

But still the sleepless watchdogs bark. It is all that they can
do, and we should get used to them. In our own country, whatever
country it may be, we have our own share of them, and some of them
bear distinguished names. No other nation has any more, and no
nation takes them really seriously, any more than we do. And one
and all, their bark is worse than their bite, and the cost of
feeding them is doubtless worse than either.

[pg
205]

En Casserole

Return to Table of
Contents

Special to our Readers

Those of you who have not received your Reviews on time will probably now find a double
interest in the article in the last number, on Our Government
Subvention to Literature. In conveying periodicals so cheaply,
not only is Uncle Sam engaged in a bad job, but he is doing it
cheaply, and consequently badly, and he has more of it than he can
well handle. He is at length carrying them as freight, and
most of you know what that means. We are receiving complaints of
delay on all sides, and an appreciable part of the unwelcome
subvention Uncle Sam is giving us, goes in sending duplicates of
lost copies. We don’t acknowledge any obligation, legal or
moral, to do this; but we love our subscribers—more or less
disinterestedly—and try to do them all the kinds of good we
can. Partly to enable us to do that, as long as the subvention is
given, we follow the example of the excellent Pooh Bah, and put our
pride (and the subvention) into our pockets. Even if we did not
love our subscribers so, we should have to do the pocketing all the
same, because our competitors do. Competitors are always a very
shameless sort of people.

We wish, however, that Uncle Sam would keep his subvention in
his own pocket, and so lead to a higher plane all competitors in
the magazine business, including some of those who don’t want
to rise to a higher plane. The best of such a proceeding on his
part would be that he would also, through the complicated
influences described in the article referred to encourage up to a
higher plane [pg 206]those who write for popular magazines.
Those who write for The Unpopular Review
are, of course, on the highest possible plane already. This remark
is made solely for the benefit of readers taking up the
Review for the first time. To others it is
superfluous, and if there is anything we try to avoid, it is, as we
have so many times to tell volunteer contributors, superfluities.
Even popularity we do not try to avoid, but—!

The foregoing paragraph was written with little thought of what
was coming to be added to it. You and we have something to be proud
of. Our Review has been doing its part in
saving all Europe from the waste of hundreds of millions of money,
and the literatures of all Europe from a degradation like that
through which our own is passing. Read the following letter:

While we are not slow to take all the credit that our supporters
and ourselves are entitled to in this matter, we should be very
slow tacitly to accept the lion’s share of it, which is due
to Colonel C.W. Burrows of Cleveland, who supplied all of the facts
and nearly all of the expression of the article in question, and
who has for years, lately as President of the One Cent Letter
Postage League, been devoting himself with unsparing energy and
self-sacrifice to stopping the waste of money and capacity that the
mistaken outbreak of paternalism we are discussing has brought upon
the country.

Demos is a good fellow—when he behaves himself, and that
generally means when he is not abused or flattered; but how
supremely ridiculous, not to say destructive, he is when he gets to
masquerading in the robes of the scholar or the judge; and how
criminal is the demagogue who seeks personal aggrandisement by
dangling those robes before him.

Our modesty has been so anesthetized by the preceding letter,
that it permits us to show you, in strict confidence of course, a
paragraph from another. A new subscriber, apparently going it blind
on the recommendation of a friend, writes:

Now, somehow, “gentleman” is a word that we are very
chary of using. We couldn’t put that remark on an advertising
page, but perhaps there is no inconsistency in putting it here, and
confessing that we like it—and that we even suspect that we
have always had a subconscious idea that [pg 208]it was just what
we were after—that it includes, or ought to include, about
everything that we are trying to accomplish. In any interpretation,
it is certainly an encouragement to keep pegging away.

Most of our readers probably remember a letter on pp. 432-3 of
the Casserole of the April-June number, from an individual
who thought we were trying to humbug the wage-receiving world into
a false and dangerous contentment with existing conditions. This
inference was probably drawn from our insistent promulgation of the
belief that a man’s fortune depends more upon himself than
upon his conditions.

As a contrast to that remarkable letter, it is a great pleasure
to call attention to the following still more remarkable one. It is
from a printer—not one in our employ.

[pg
209]Possibly some of you are disappointed at not finding
this number as full as the daily papers of wisdom on War and the
Mexican situation. In one sense we are disappointed ourselves: for
we had made arrangements for at least one article of that general
nature from one of our best qualified contributors; but when it
came time to write it (speaking by the calendar), he showed the
excellence of his qualifications by saying that, considering the
situation and the function of this Review,
it was not time—that the situation had not yet
become mature enough or broad enough for any general
conclusions—for any treatment beyond that already well given
by the newspapers and other organs of frequent publication, and
that they were giving all the details called for. We will wait,
then, and try to philosophize when the time comes.

We find, however, that with little deliberate intention on our
part, this number has turned out “seasonable” in
another sense, and hope you will find it so. Witness the articles
on Chautauqua, and Railway Junctions, and
Tips (entitled A Stubborn Relic of Feudalism) and
several others.

Philosophy in Fly Time

In the old days, before the destruction of the white pines
removed the chief source of American inventiveness—the
universal habit of whittling—every boy had a jackknife, and
also had boxes, sometimes of wood, sometimes of writing paper, in
which he kept flies. Now he has neither flies nor jackknife.

Then, when he wanted a fly, nine times out of ten he could catch
one with a sweep of the hand. That was before the fly was charged
with an amount of bad deeds, if they really were as bad as
represented, which would have destroyed the human race long before
the plagues of Egypt; or if not before the fly plague, would have
caused that plague to leave no Egyptians alive to enjoy the later
ones. With these new opinions of the fly, began a crusade against
him; and now the boys can’t have any more fun with [pg
210]him—that is, only good boys can—the kind
that catch him with illusive traps, for a cent a hundred. The other
kind of boys may occasionally be sports enough to hunt him with the
swatter; but it’s pretty poor hunting: for the game is so shy
that generally before you get within reach of him, he is off: so
swatting him is difficult, while catching him by hand, as we boys
used to, is virtually impossible.

Now for some questions profound enough to befit our pages. (I)
Have only a select group of very alert and quick flies survived? or
(II) Have the flies told each other that that big clumsy brute with
only two legs to walk on, and two aborted ones which do all sorts
of foolish things—the brute with only one lens to an eye
(though he sometimes puts a glass one over it) and a pitifully
aborted proboscis—the brute that has no wings, and
can’t get ahead more than about once his own length in a
second—that this clumsy brute had at last got so jealous of
the six legs, hundred-lensed eyes, proboscis, wings and speed of
the fly, that he had started a new crusade against him, and must be
specially avoided?

Then, after it is ascertained whether the timidity of the flies
is because this story has been passed around among them, or only
because men have already killed off all but the specially quick and
timid ones; we hope our investigators may find an answer to the
farther question: (III) How, if a tenth of what some folks say
against flies is true, the human race has so long survived?

To avoid misapprehension, it should be added that despite the
availability, in our boyhood, of flies as playmates, we don’t
like ‘em, especially when they light on our hands to help us
write articles for this Review.

Setting Bounds to Laughter

That there is even a measure of personal liberty on the earth,
is one of our most pointed proofs that the universe is governed by
design. For liberty is loved neither [pg 211]by the many nor
by the few; its defense has always been unpopular in the extreme,
and can be manfully undertaken only in an age of moral heroism. The
present is no heroic age, and hence our personal rights fall one by
one, without defense, and apparently without regret. The losses
thus incurred must be left to future historians to weigh and to
lament. There is, however, one of our natural rights, now cruelly
beset by its enemies, that is too precious to surrender to the
threnodies of the future historians. This is the right to
laugh.

It is scarcely a quarter of a century since the first appearance
of organized efforts to curb the spirit of laughter. All good men
and women were hectored into believing that one should weep, not
laugh, over the absurdities of men in their cups. Next, we were
warned that it is unseemly and unChristian to laugh at a
fellow-man’s discomfiture—an awkward social situation,
a sermon or a political oration wrecked by stage fright, or a poem
spoilt by a printer’s stupidity. Under shelter of the dogma
that to laugh at the ridiculous is unlawful, there have recently
grown into vigor multitudinous anti-laughter alliances, racial,
national and professional. Not many years ago a censorship of Irish
jokes was established, and this was soon followed by an index
expurgatorious of Teutonic jokes. Our colored fellow citizens
promptly advanced the claim that jokes at the expense of their race
are “in bad taste”; and country life enthusiasts
solemnly affirmed that the rural and suburban jokes are nothing
short of national disasters. A recent press report informs us that
the suffragette joke has been excluded from the vaudeville circuits
throughout the country. And the movement grows apace. Domestic
servants, stenographers, politicians, college professors, and
clergymen are organizing to establish the right of being ridiculous
without exciting laughter.

But what does it all matter? What is laughter but an
old-fashioned aid to digestion, more or less discredited by [pg
212]current medical authority? It is time we learned that
laughter has a social significance: it is the first stage in the
process of understanding one’s fellow man. Professor Bergson
to the contrary notwithstanding, you can not laugh with your
intellect alone. An essential element of your laughter is sympathy.
You can not laugh at an idiot, nor at a superman. You can not laugh
at a Hindoo or a Korean; you can hardly force a smile to your lips
over the conduct of a Bulgar, a Serb, or a Slovak. You are
beginning to find something comic in the Italian, because you are
beginning to know him. And all the world laughs at the Irishman,
because all the world knows him and loves him.

When Benjamin Franklin walked down the streets of Philadelphia,
carrying a book under his arm, and munching a crust of bread, just
one person observed him, a rosy maiden, who laughed merrily at him.
As our old school readers narrated, with naïve surprise, this
maiden was destined to become Franklin’s faithful wife. And
yet psychology should have led us to expect such a result. The
stupidest small boy making faces or turning somersaults before the
eyes of his pig-tailed inamorata, evidences his appreciation of the
sentimental value of the ridiculous. When did we first grant some
small corner in our hearts to the Chinese? It was when we were
introduced to Bret Harte’s gambler:

The natural history of the racial or professional joke is easily
written. At the outset it is crude and cruel, wholly at the expense
of the group represented. In time the world wearies of an unequal
contest, and we have a new order of jokes, in which the intended
victim acquits himself well. This, too, gives way to a higher
order, in which race, nationality or profession is employed merely
as [pg
213]a cloak for common humanity. The successive stages mark
the progress in assimilation, induced, in large measure, by
laughter. There is no other social force so potent in creating
mutual understanding and practical fraternity of spirit; in
establishing the essential unity of mankind underneath its
phenomenal diversity. Setting bounds to laughter: why, this is to
indenture the angel of charity to the father of lies and the lord
of hate.

A Post Graduate School for Academic Donors

At a recent meeting of an University Montessori Club the case of
donors to colleges and universities was reported on by a special
committee. The majority report drew a pretty heavy indictment. It
was shown that the givers to colleges and universities seldom
considered the real needs of their beneficiaries. Donors liked to
give expensive buildings without endowment for upkeep, liked to
give vast athletic fields, rejoiced in stadiums, affected memorial
statuary and stained glass windows, dabbled in landscape gardening,
but seldom were known either to give anything unconditionally or,
specifically, to destine a gift for such uninspiring needs as more
books or professors’ pay. The result of giving without first
considering the needs of the benefited college or university, was
that every gift made the beneficiary more lopsided. Certain
universities were almost capsized by their incidental architecture.
Others were subsidizing graduate students to whom the conditions of
successful research were denied. Still others were calling great
specialists to the teaching force without providing the apparatus
for the pursuit of these specialties. Others preferred to offer
financial aid to students who were poor—in every sense.
Donors apparently without exception had single-track minds. They
saw plainly enough what they wanted to give, but never took the
pains to see the donation in its relation to the institution as a
whole. The majority report, which was [pg 214]drawn by our
famous Latinist, Professor Claudius Senex, concluded with the
despairing note Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. The
minority report was delivered orally by young Simpson Smith of the
department of banking and finance. He “allowed” that
everything alleged by the majority report was true, but saw no use
in dwelling on such truths, since donors always had done and always
would do just as they darned pleased.

The Club took a more hopeful view of the case, and it was voted
that our Club should resolve itself into the trustees and faculty
of a Post Graduate School for Academic Donors. Our committee
recommended that we qualify our advanced students by conferring the
lower degree of Heedless Donor (H.D.) every year upon all givers
who can be shown to have given at random. No method of instruction
seemed more appropriate than the seminar plan of practical
exercises based on concrete instances. The first laboratory
experiment was performed in the presence of a Seminar of seven
H.D.’s. in a specially called meeting of married professors
attired only in bath gowns borrowed from the crews and base ball
teams. Into this assembly the class of H.D.’s was suddenly
introduced. They naturally inquired into the meaning of the
spectacle, and were informed that in no case did the mere salary of
these professors enable them to wear clothes at all. “But you
do usually wear clothes?” inquired a student of a favorite
professor. “How do you get them?” “By University
extension lecturing at ten dollars a lecture” was the quiet
answer. Another professor explained that he got his clothes by
tutoring dull students, another by book reviewing. One somewhat
shamefacedly said the clothes came from his wife’s money. One
declined to answer, and, as a matter of fact, his clothes are
habitually first worn by a more fortunate elder brother.

On the whole the results of our first seminary exercise were
satisfactory. One student immediately drew a considerable check for
the salary fund, another, who [pg 215]had been
planning to give a hockey rink, said he would think things over.
Still a third deposited forty pairs of slightly worn trousers with
the university treasurer, “for whom it might concern.”
Only one accepted the demonstration contentedly. He admitted that
low pay and extra work were hard on the Professors, but he also
felt that these outside activities advertised the university and
were good business. Of course you wore out some professors in the
process, but you could always get others.

Our second seminary exercise was of a less spectacular sort. The
post graduate donors were each provided with a bibliography. This
in every instance contained the titles of books that a particular
professor or graduate student in the university would need to
consult for his studies of the ensuing week. It was briefly
explained by Professor Senex that original research could not be
successfully accomplished without reference to all the original
sources and to the writings of other scholars. The bibliographies
ran from ten titles or so to nearly a hundred, according to the
nature of the particular research involved. The exercise consisted
in going to the university library and matching these titles of
desiderata with the books actually in the catalogue. After varying
intervals, the post graduate donors returned with their report.
Nobody had found more than half the books sought for: many had
found less.

The effect of this demonstration was interesting. The donor who
had tended towards the hockey rink, instead transferred his
$100,000 to the book purchase fund. He said he guessed the old
place needed real books more than it needed artificial ice. Others
followed his example according to their ability.

The student who was satisfied with our bath robe faculty
meeting, came back from the library equally pleased. He had not
compared his bibliography with the catalogue, but a brief general
inspection had convinced him that there were already more books in
the library than anybody [pg 216]could read. His
intention held firm to give his Alma Mater a tower higher than any
university tower on record and containing a chime of bells that
periodically played the college song. The tower was naturally to
bear his name, which was also his dear mother’s.

A Suggestion Regarding Vacations

Why wouldn’t it be well for the country colleges to
shorten their summer vacations, and lengthen their winter ones?
Then urban students would not, for so long a period in summer, be
put to their trumps to find out what to do with themselves; and,
what is more important, in winter both faculty and students would
have increased opportunity for metropolitan experience. In the
summer vacations, the cities are empty of music, drama, and most
else of what makes them distinctively worth while. Intellectually,
the country needs the city at least as much as, morally, the city
needs the country.

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We are disposed to do a little gratuitous advertising for good
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send us some more.

Help Wanted. From a young gentleman of education,
leisure and energy, who desires to devote a part of his time, in
connection with scholars and philanthropists, to a reform of
world-wide importance. Such a person may possibly learn of a
congenial opportunity by addressing.

X.T.C.
Care ofThe Unpopular Review.

A few hundred persons of the kind whose help is sought by this
advertisement would have the salvation of the republic in their
hands. But somehow those who have the leisure generally lack the
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leisure.

[pg
217]

Simplified Spelling

After receiving, in answer to the invitation in our first
number, a few bitter objections to simplified spelling, we have
felt like apologizing each time we approached the subject. Perhaps
the best apology we can make is that apparently the majority of our
readers are interested in it. Therefore we hope that the others
will tolerate as equably as they can, the devotion of a little
space to it in the interest of the majority. Perhaps the objectors
may ultimately be able to settle the difficulty as we and our house
have settled another unconquerable nuisance—the dandelions on
our lawns—: we have concluded to like them.

Our recent correspondence regarding Simplified Spelling has
developed a few points which we submit to those who abominate it,
those who favor it, and those who, like the eminent
school-superintendent we have already quoted, and like ourselves
for that matter, do both:

To a leading Professor of Greek: